MEANINGLESS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does meaningless mean? 

• MEANINGLESS (adjective)
  The adjective MEANINGLESS has 2 senses:

1. having no meaning or direction or purpose

2. producing no result or effect

  Familiarity information: MEANINGLESS used as an adjective is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• MEANINGLESS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Having no meaning or direction or purpose

Synonyms:

meaningless; nonmeaningful

Context example:

a verbose but meaningless explanation

Similar:

empty; hollow; vacuous (devoid of significance or force)

insignificant (signifying nothing)

mindless (lacking the thinking capacity characteristic of a conscious being)

nonsense; nonsensical (having no intelligible meaning)

unmeaning (without meaning)

Also:

unimportant (not important)

purposeless (not evidencing any purpose or goal)

insignificant; unimportant (devoid of importance, meaning, or force)

Antonym:

meaningful (having a meaning or purpose)

Derivation:

meaninglessness (a message that seems to convey no meaning)

Sense 2

Meaning:

Producing no result or effect

Synonyms:

futile; ineffectual; meaningless; otiose; unavailing

Context example:

an unavailing attempt

Similar:

useless (having no beneficial use or incapable of functioning usefully)

 Context examples 

My experiences were so many meaningless pictures.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Neural activity changes when a person is listening to spoken language — but the brain also locks onto random, meaningless bursts of sound in a very similar way and at a similar frequency.

(The Rhythms of Sign Language, NSF)

I fancy that the poor fellow murmured some incoherent delirious words, and that she twisted them into this meaningless message.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

These coats-of-arms could be read, where a scroll would be meaningless, and the bowman, like most men of his age, was well versed in the common symbols of heraldry.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It is meaningless.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that was just beautiful without rhyme or reason.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

He found books on trigonometry in the mathematics section, and ran the pages, and stared at the meaningless formulas and figures.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Of course it's all valueless, just so much dull and sordid plodding; but it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at sixty dollars a month, adding up endless columns of meaningless figures until one dies.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

He heard words spoken that were meaningless to him, and other words that he had seen only in books and that no man or woman he had known was of large enough mental caliber to pronounce.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

Just as he caught the swing of them and started, his imagination attuned in flight, always they vanished away in a chaotic scramble of sounds that was meaningless to him, and that dropped his imagination, an inert weight, back to earth.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)