Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Not causing or incapable of causing harm.
- adjective Not intended to harm or offend; inoffensive.
- adjective Of or relating to an error in a trial that would not change the outcome and therefore does not call for a reversal of the case on appeal.
- adjective Not giving rise to legal liability.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Free from physical harm; unhurt; undamaged; uninjured: as, he escaped harmless.
- Free from loss; free from liability to pay for loss or damage: as, to hold or save one harmless.
- Free from power or disposition to harm; not hurtful or injurious; innocent: as, a harmless snake; harmless play.
- Inoffensive, unoffending, innocuous, in-noxious.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Free from harm; unhurt.
- adjective Free from power or disposition to harm; innocent; inoffensive.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
incapable of causingharm ordanger - adjective not
intended to harm;inoffensive - adjective
safe
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective not causing or capable of causing harm
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
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Examples
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So then we had the question then of whether it was subject to what we call harmless error, and we said, yes, it is, so then of the cases that had come up, we had to first see if there was error, and then if there was error, was it harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.
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When Pliny the younger was proprætor of the province of Pontica in Asia Minor, he wrote to ask the Emperor what to do about the Christians, telling him what he had been able to find out about them from two slave girls who had been tortured; namely, that they were wont to meet together at night or early morning, to sing together, and eat what he called a harmless social meal.
Young Folks' History of Rome Charlotte Mary Yonge 1862
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Our daily routine include attending lectures, facing one struggle or the other, fighting for the rights of students, studying, gisting with friends or just do "God knows what" in harmless ways.
Archive 2009-07-01 2009
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Its harm can be mitigated or directed in harmless directions (ie Red Sox vs. Yankees), but never removed.
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Secret Service should know that terrorist can come in harmless but more harmful and dangerous inside.
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Our daily routine include attending lectures, facing one struggle or the other, fighting for the rights of students, studying, gisting with friends or just do "God knows what" in harmless ways.
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Often with only an hour or two notice, groups of folks, of various ages, gather to participate in harmless, goofy activity.
Hijinks Ensue 2008
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Because they resemble certain harmless garter-snake like species, they were imported into the U.S. and U.K. under the wrong names, and ended up causing medically-significant emergencies when they bit their new owners.
Archive 2007-01-01 2007
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To understand the privacy issue one has to look at the big picture to understand that each new piece of information collected about us, no matter how seemingly harmless, is increasingly being added together with thousands of other data points to create an extremely intrusive, high-resolution picture of our lives.
Boing Boing: January 12, 2003 - January 18, 2003 Archives 2003
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But aside from all that, the notion that Yankee Stadium will render Giambi harmless is just plain silly.
actung commented on the word harmless
also describes a decaf espresso
December 10, 2010