Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The character or condition of being senseless, in any sense.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state of being senseless.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun total lack of meaning or ideas

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From senseless +‎ -ness

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Examples

  • And not only had they found nothing, but they had plainly acknowledged that the very thing which made me despair -- namely the senselessness of life -- is the one indubitable thing man can know.

    A Confession 1887

  • Nay! my son was passing fair, and when thou sawest him thy fancy straight became thy Cypris; for every sensual act that men commit, they lay upon this goddess, and rightly does her name of Aphrodite begin the word for "senselessness"; so when thou didst catch sight of him in gorgeous foreign garb, ablaze with gold, thy senses utterly forsook thee.

    The Trojan Women 2008

  • Nay! my son was passing fair, and when thou sawest him thy fancy straight became thy Cypris; for every sensual act that men commit, they lay upon this goddess, and rightly does her name of Aphrodite begin the word for "senselessness"; so when thou didst catch sight of him in gorgeous foreign garb, ablaze with gold, thy senses utterly forsook thee.

    The Trojan Women 2008

  • It may have been senseless by our standards, but it was a kind of senselessness that we have to expect from people like them.

    The Sinister Six Combo Castro, Adam Troy 2001

  • Why, he thought, pleased as an overtired child with the fancy, in a sense they were always alone, shut up in a kind of senselessness -- just like us all.

    The Return Walter De la Mare 1914

  • All that kind of senselessness is doing is serving to make Harris more sympathetic.

    MVN 2008

  • "senselessness" of those entrusted with its affairs, as threatening

    Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather A Reply Charles Wentworth Upham 1838

  • His mother called me several times and I was very affected by her story and the senselessness of having a man spend a quarter of a century in prison for theft of a cheap television.

    The Conservative Assault on the Constitution Erwin Chemerinsky 2010

  • Is it right to use these great historical events as triggers for personal development, or is it right to leave them in their senselessness and waste?

    Moral Universes « Tales from the Reading Room 2009

  • Increasingly, a new majority of American voters were energized and angered not just by the senselessness of U.S. actions in Iraq, but by a government that was largely alone among our allies in ignoring the well-established science on man-made global warming, or the lack of sanity in the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policies toward homosexuals.

    Will Bunch: Sanity, Iraq, and Jon Stewart's "View From Nowhere" Will Bunch 2010

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