Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Lazy; indolent.
- adjective Of no use; pointless or superfluous.
- adjective Ineffective; futile. synonym: vain.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Being at rest or ease; not at work; unemployed; inactive; idle.
- Made, done, or performed in a leisurely, half-hearted way; perfunctory, negligent; careless; hence, ineffective; vain; futile; to no purpose.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Being at leisure or ease; unemployed; indolent; idle.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Resulting in no
effect . - adjective Reluctant to
work or toexert oneself. - adjective Having no
reason for being (raison d’être ); having nopoint , reason, orpurpose .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective disinclined to work or exertion
- adjective producing no result or effect
- adjective serving no useful purpose; having no excuse for being
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word otiose.
Examples
-
I'm sorry to be such a scrotum, but did you mean to type "otiose" or "obtuse"?
"Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much." Ann Althouse 2007
-
Still, I pack too much, a huge duffle crammed with triple and quadruple of everything: shirts, shorts, footwear, rainwear, and all sorts of otiose extras I know I will never use.
Richard Bangs: Following Brad and Angelina to Namibia, Part I Richard Bangs 2011
-
Instead the Tories plan to ring-fence NHS spending, thus keeping hordes of adminstrators who are otherwise otiose beavering away at nothing very much.
Archive 2009-06-14 2009
-
Instead the Tories plan to ring-fence NHS spending, thus keeping hordes of adminstrators who are otherwise otiose beavering away at nothing very much.
-
For the rest of the year, I fought with my father who felt that a piano was an otiose flamboyance of the upper classes.
Moondog Marcus Speh 2011
-
Still, I pack too much, a huge duffle crammed with triple and quadruple of everything: shirts, shorts, footwear, rainwear, and all sorts of otiose extras I know I will never use.
Richard Bangs: Following Brad and Angelina to Namibia, Part I Richard Bangs 2011
-
For all anyone knows, al-Qaida's gloating in its murderous glossy magazine, Inspire, and Niall Ferguson's talk of a caliphate are just as otiose as Blair's jawdropping exhortation, given his legacy of mayhem, for the west to show "the courage of our convictions, and the self-confident belief we can achieve them".
Women are often the losers when the west weighs in | Catherine Bennett 2011
-
The sooner we quit fiddling with otiose sanctions against Iran, the sooner we can begin crafting containment and deterrence strategies that are actually effective.
-
I'm suprised, there's no otiose argument on the decline of M Night Shyamalan's movies yet.
Twisted New Poster for Shyamalan's The Happening « FirstShowing.net 2008
-
A propos of QUANGOs, there are other elements of Government which are surely otiose.
knitandpurl commented on the word otiose
"But what I demanded from this performance—as from the visit to Balbec and the visit to Venice for which I had so intensely longed—was something quite different from pleasure: verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me by any trivial incident—even though it were to cause me bodily suffering—of my otiose existence."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 17 of the Modern Library paperback edition
March 5, 2008
chained_bear commented on the word otiose
"...in this single instance he did fuss, trying to make it perform miracles, urging the sun to shed a diffused and even illumination, uttering otiose explanations."
--P. O'Brian, The Commodore, 75
March 16, 2008
duckbill commented on the word otiose
Otious (from Latin otium, ease or rest) is an alternate spelling.
An important shade of meaning is without painstaking:
"(Jesus Christ would warn his listeners) against the otiose attention of curiosity or mere intellectual interest, and would fix upon their minds a sense of their moral responsibility for the effects produced by what they heard."
Paley speaks of "otious assent".
Dean Alford speaks of an "otiose and unprofitable way of keeping the Sabbath".
April 19, 2011
biocon commented on the word otiose
In addition, otiose means redundant (Oxford English Dictionary).
September 26, 2011