Log in or Sign up
  1. bootless love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. adj. Without advantage or benefit; useless. See Synonyms at futile.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. Without boot or advantage; unavailing; unprofitable; useless; without profit or success.

Wiktionary

  1. adj. without boots
  2. adj. profitless; pointless; unavailing

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. adj. Unavailing; unprofitable; useless; without advantage or success.

WordNet 3.0

  1. adj. unproductive of success

Etymologies

  1. This definition is lacking an etymology or has an incomplete etymology. You can help Wiktionary by giving it a proper etymology. (Wiktionary)
  2. boot2 + -less. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “If their forays were bootless, in the nature of things their forays would cease.”

    The Golden Poppy

  • “Yet to sojourn in San Antonio unherbed was to set off under the searing sun naked, scalped, and bootless across some scree of burning rock straight out of Cormac McCarthy.”

    Fictionaut: Alamo Rag

  • “Hitchens gave short shrift to the "insulting" suggestion that cancer might persuade him to change his position where reason had not, arguing that to ditch principles "held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favour at the last minute" would be a "hucksterish choice", and urging those who had taken it upon themselves to pray for him not to "trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries".”

    The Guardian: Christopher Hitchens dies aged 62

  • “And the men appeared, some of his watch, others of the second mate's watch, routed from sleep -- men coatless, and hatless, and bootless; men ghastly-faced with fear but eager for once to spring to the orders of the man who knew and could save their miserable lives from miserable death.”

    CHAPTER XXXVIII

  • “But my hands had been tied behind my back and when my bootless feet slipped on the ice I had no way of catching myself.”

    On Desperate Seas « A Fly in Amber

  • “In The Extra Man, based on a creepy comic novel by Jonathan Ames, Dano plays Louis Ives, a bootless young man who fancies himself a character out of The Great Gatsby.”

    The Huffington Post: Marshall Fine: HuffPost Review: The Extra Man

  • “  He subsequently surfaced in aficcione, a tale of his bootless pursuit of a reclusive poetess, modeled on one I'd met on-line.”

    Fictionaut: My Fictional Tormenter

  • “The attack was bootless and the guards immediately arrested Meir, the hero of the ghetto.”

    Fictionaut: Heroic

  • “And the fact is that millions of Negroes, as a result of centuries of denial and neglect, have been left bootless.”

    April « 2008 « Bill Ayers

  • “Here are a few examples from this worthy tome, which is illustrated by the stupendously talented Seth: bootless: Must every non-useless, non-unprofitable activity involve wearing boots?”

    Boing Boing

Show 10 more examples...

Log in or sign up to add your own related words.

synonyms (4)

Words with the same meaning

  1. unavailing
  1. unprofitable
  1. useless
  1. fruitless

equivalents (1)

Other words for ‘bootless’

  1. unproductive

same context (22)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. gloveless
  2. unavailing
  3. fruitless
  4. collarless
  1. shoeless
  2. abortive
  3. inefficacious
  4. unprofitable
  1. anguished
  2. bonnetless
  3. thankless
  4. churchly
  1. coatless
  2. milfhunter
  3. purple-faced
  4. ill-considered
  1. never-ending
  2. causeless
  3. fratricidal
  4. deadlier
  1. sway-backed
  2. ill-fated

reverse dictionary (9)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. boteless
  1. effectless
  1. sleeveless
  1. fruitless
  1. futile
  1. idle
  1. unprofitable
  1. useless
  1. vain

tags (1)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. -less

Log in or sign up to add your own tag.

Wordmap

(beta)

Word visualization

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘bootless’.

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • whichbe Ineffectual; useless. Around the time of the Norman Conquest a boot, also often spelt bote, was something advantageous, profitable or good (through the ancient Germanic languages, it’s closely linked with better and best as the comparative and superlative of good).

    We still have it in the fixed phrase to boot, meaning something extra or additional; back around the year 1000 the phrase meant "to the good; to one’s advantage". There were lots of meanings associated with boot: it might mean a levy taken to repair a road or bridge; in the feudal system it referred to the right of a tenant to take timber from his lord’s estate for fuel or repairs (a set of words existed for various kinds, such as firebote, housebote, and hedgebote). It could also mean compensation for wrongdoing or injury. In this sense, it often appeared in compounds, such as man-bote, compensation by a person to somebody he had injured, or the later thief-bote, a bribe or reparations by a thief to avoid prosecution.

    If you were bootless, you were without help or remedy or couldn’t be compensated. The meaning evolved into the figurative sense of something fruitless, unprofitable, or to no useful purpose. Charles Dickens used it this way in A Tale of Two Cities: "'Well!' said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of bootless attempts to bring him round to the question."

    But the most famous example is probably that in Shakespeare's Henry IV in which the Bard puns on two senses of the word:

    Glendower: Three times hath Henry Bolingbroke made head
    Against my power; thrice from the banks of Wye
    And sandy-bottom'd Severn have I sent him
    Bootless home and weather-beaten back.
    Hotspur: Home without boots, and in foul weather too?
    How scapes he agues, in the devil's name.
    (from World Wide Words) May 20, 2008

Tweets

Looking for tweets for bootless.

‘bootless’ has been looked up 2630 times, loved by 1 person, added to 13 lists, commented on 1 time, and has a Scrabble score of 10.