Mindless

How to spell mindless

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce mindless

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does mindless mean?

1. adjectiveDone without thought or care, or requiring no intelligence or attention.

Mindless in a sentence

• The spreadsheet involved hours of mindless data entry.

• The report condemned the mindless destruction of the old gardens.

Where does mindless come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound, formed from 'mind' and the suffix '-less'. 'Mind' descends from the Old English 'gemynd', which meant memory, thought, or the faculty of reasoning, and which traces back to a root shared with Latin 'mens' (mind) and the verb 'to remember'. The suffix '-less' comes from the Old English 'leas', meaning loose, free from, or lacking, the same element that gives us 'hopeless' and 'careless'. Joined together, the word literally describes something or someone 'lacking mind', and it has long carried both the idea of acting without thought and the idea of a task that demands no thought. Because both halves are common everyday words spelled exactly as they sound, the compound holds no real spelling surprise; the only thing to remember is that '-less' keeps a single 's' before the final consonant.

How the word is built

• mind (the thinking faculty)
• -less (without, free from)