Powerless

How to spell powerless

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce powerless

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does powerless mean?

1. adjectiveLacking the strength, authority, or ability to act or to control a situation.

Powerless in a sentence

• Without the password, he felt completely powerless to fix the account.

• The small union was powerless against such a large employer.

Where does powerless come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a transparent compound built inside English from the noun 'power' and the suffix '-less'. The noun 'power' arrived through Old French 'poeir' or 'pouoir', meaning 'to be able', which itself descended from a Vulgar Latin form 'potere', a reshaping of the classical Latin 'posse', 'to be able'; that same root sits inside everyday words like 'possible' and 'potent'. The suffix '-less' is a native Old English element, 'leas', meaning 'free from' or 'devoid of', and it has stayed productive in English for well over a thousand years, attaching to nouns to mean 'lacking that thing'. By joining a Romance-derived noun to a Germanic suffix, English created an adjective meaning 'without power' that was in use by the late medieval period. The spelling trap is simply the double 's' that appears when the noun's final letter meets the suffix '-less', since the base 'power' itself has no 's' at all.

How the word is built

• power (noun: strength, control, authority)
• -less (suffix: without, lacking)