Heartless

How to spell heartless

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce heartless

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heartless mean?

1. adjectiveShowing no compassion, kindness, or feeling for others.

Heartless in a sentence

• The landlord was heartless enough to evict the family at Christmas.

• It felt heartless to ignore the colleague who had asked for help.

Where does heartless come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English formation, joining the Old English word heorte, meaning the physical heart, with the suffix -leas, which meant 'free from' or 'without'. The heart had long been regarded as the seat of feeling and courage, so describing someone as 'without a heart' naturally came to mean lacking kindness or compassion rather than literally missing the organ. The word is recorded in Old English in the sense of dispirited or lacking courage, and the modern sense of cruel and unfeeling developed over the medieval and early modern periods. The -less ending here is the same one that gives us fearless, careless and hopeless, all built on the idea of being without the named quality. Because the spelling simply stacks the familiar word heart onto a familiar suffix, the only real trap is remembering the silent letters inside heart itself.

How the word is built

• heart (the organ, figuratively the seat of emotion)
• -less (without)