vacuous
[vak-yoo-uh s]
- without contents; empty: the vacuous air.
- lacking in ideas or intelligence: a vacuous mind.
- expressing or characterized by a lack of ideas or intelligence; inane; stupid: a vacuous book.
- purposeless; idle: a vacuous way of life.
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Origin of vacuous
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2018
Related Words for vacuousness
chasm, destitution, desolation, vacuum, hollowness, gap, vacancy, barrenness, blank, vacuity, waste, exhaustion, inanity, inanitionExamples from the Web for vacuousness
Contemporary Examples of vacuousness
He hated TV for chasing fads and its vacuousness, but also because it paid him too little, notes Itzkoff dryly.
Historical Examples of vacuousness
Then he looked up at Victoria with something like vacuousness.
A Bed of RosesW. L. George
vacuous
- containing nothing; empty
- bereft of ideas or intelligence; mindless
- characterized by or resulting from vacancy of minda vacuous gaze
- indulging in no useful mental or physical activity; idle
- logic maths (of an operator or expression) having no import; idle: in (x) (John is tall) the quantifier (x) is vacuous
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Word Origin for vacuous
C17: from Latin vacuus empty, from vacāre to be empty
Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
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Word Origin and History for vacuousness
vacuous
1640s, "empty," from Latin vacuus "empty, void, free" (see vacuum). Figurative sense of "empty of ideas" is from 1848. Related: Vacuously; vacuousness.
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Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper