meaningless

From meaning +‎ -less.

• IPA^(key): /ˈmiːnɪŋləs/
• Hyphenation: mean‧ing‧less

• Audio (US):

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meaningless (comparative more meaningless, superlative most meaningless)

1. Lacking meaning.

   Synonyms: nonsensical, senseless

   Antonyms: meaningful, sensical

   The word "gugugu" is meaningless in English.

   • 2007 August 24, William Grimes, “Uh, Lead My Rips: No More Bloopers”, in The New York Times‎^[1], archived from the original on 4 January 2013:

     As the years go by, speech reverts to childhood levels of disfluency, with more pauses, more errors, more repeated words, but even the peak years are not great: up to 8 percent of the average person’s word output consists of meaningless fillers and placeholders like um, uh and er.

2. Insignificant; not worthy of importance.

   Synonyms: negligible, trivial, unmeaningful, hollow

   Antonyms: meaningful, significant

   All our efforts were ultimately meaningless.

   • 2013 July 20, “Old soldiers?”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8845:

     Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine. The machine gun is so much more lethal than the bow and arrow that comparisons are meaningless.

   • 2025 April 10, Adam Serwer, “The Confrontation Between Trump and the Supreme Court Has Arrived”, in The Atlantic‎^[2], archived from the original on 11 April 2025:

     If the Trump administration retains the ability to send anyone in the United States to be imprisoned abroad, then the rights of American citizens, and not just immigrants and the undocumented, are meaningless.

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