Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Having no useful result.
- adj. Trifling and frivolous; idle: the futile years after her artistic peak.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Frivolous; merely loquacious.
- Of no effect; answering no valuable purpose; useless; ineffective; trifling: as, futile efforts; futile prattle.
- Synonyms Trivial, frivolous, unimportant, useless, bootless, unavailing, profitless, vain, idle.
Wiktionary
- adj. Incapable of producing results; useless; not successful; not worth attempting.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. obsolete Talkative; loquacious; tattling.
- adj. Of no importance; answering no useful end; useless; vain; worthless.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. producing no result or effect
- adj. unproductive of success
Etymologies
- From Latin fūtilis. (Wiktionary)
- Latin fūtilis; see gheu- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“It will cost millions in marketing and promotion, or what I call a futile attempt and waste of shareholder equity.”
“Cape Town after the union staged a go-slow following what it termed futile wage negotiations.”
“Based on this dubious proposition, the researchers bizarrely advocate what they call "futile busyness, namely, busyness serving no purpose other than to prevent idleness.”
“TEHRAN (Reuters) - The wife of Iranian opposition leader Mirhossein Mousavi says her 62-year-old brother was among those detained after last month's disputed election in what she called a futile attempt to ...”
WN.com - Articles related to Hollyweird - Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg
“Instead, almost a year has been wasted in futile attempts to appease the Republicans and the Mass. disaster has struck.”
“Whether this makes one's dependence on translation for access to so many important writers seem less, or more, futile is a hard question to answer.”
“Saying that an ordinary death in combat was futile is hard enough, without being associated with others who call it criminal or dishonorable.”
The Volokh Conspiracy » Washington Post Editorializes in Praise of Harold Koh’s Drone Statement
“I think the ultimate in futile laws – at least from its title – was the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978.”
Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Congressional Democrats Already Preparing to Lose Control of Congress
“Sincere apologies for any lost time spent middle-clicking a taskbar button in futile window-killing attempts.”
Middle-Click To Close Applications From Windows 7′s Taskbar | Lifehacker Australia
“How futile is it to bash one party with the other?”
Matthew Yglesias » Steve Austria (R-OH) Doesn’t Know When the Depression Happened
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘futile’.
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@vcb.etym.prjct - SAT WORD DUMP - as ...
The words on this list SAT regulars that I haven't sorted and grouped yet. It's like my wordy holding pen. get it? holding the pen to write a word? HA! I love how lame my humor is.
iconoclast, glacial, agnostic, histrionic, treacly, contemptuous, captious, bombastic, bombast, perfidy, quiescence, sordid and 148 more...
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4087 more...
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Artistic words
Good for poetry, or just artistic on their own.
fluxus, gallant, kinetic, lurk, disengage, mist, agleam, voyeur, devoid, crimson, ebony, azure and 94 more...
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GRE Barron's 800
abate, abdicate, aberrant, abeyance, abject, abjure, abscission, abscond, abstemious, abstinence, abysmal, accretion and 787 more...
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gre
municipal, whit, dissembler, berate, liberally, embellish, dissimilitude, histrionics, flamboyance, bombastic, bovine, calumny and 142 more...
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GRE 2014
abate, abdicate, abase, aberrant, abeyance, abhor, abjure, abortive, abound, abrasive, abreast, abridge and 1577 more...
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Greg's List
precarious, transient, evanescence, impermanence, fugacity, transitoriness, volatility, caducity, span, interregnum, effervescent, mine and 63 more...
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big book gre
abase, abbess, abbey, abbot, abdicate, abdomen, abdominal, abduction, abed, aberration, abet, abeyance and 6691 more...
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MY COLLECTION
COLLECT FROM DIFFERENT PAPERS,WEBSITES,BOOKS AND MOVIES.
VAUDEVILLE, herbivores, BANDWAGON, PREY, squander, squabbling, Concierge, persuade, dethrone, cacophony, maize, ubiquitous and 98 more...
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dharma66's list
words that pique my interest either by meaning, pronunciation, or spelling, and words that otherwise tickle my fancy!!
pique, elusive, serendipity, nefarious, redundant, pseudoscientific, obsequious, flack, quandary, impervious, perchance, translucent and 168 more...
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Advanced Words: Part II
facetious, felicitous, grandiloquent, germane, repatriate, exigency, exculpate, etheral, fatuous, heterogeneous, hiatus, idiosyncrasy and 118 more...
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my GRE words
pedant, wizened, histrionic, logorrhea, frenetic, approbation, quibble, knell, acclivity, droog, prevarication, aplomb and 182 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
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Words I have to learn
exasperate, felony, weld, fraud, worksheet, ransom, rehearse, preliminary, offshore, parole, infamous, sieve and 436 more...
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newGRE
mostly from magoosh
imbue, verge on, nonchalant, deliberate, timorous, futile, provisional, dissect, checked, tinged, alluring, visionary and 1046 more...
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Eazy E
motley, callous, languid, copious, dubious, contemptible, disparage, sporadic, gratuitous, disillusioned, conflagration, concordance and 99 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for futile.
bilby Confucious say, futile not enough to fix roof. Mar 22, 2011
pqnga Trivial, useless, fruitless
Comparison is futile.
In a world where comparisons happen non-stop, it is difficult to look outside
yourself and to ever be content with who you are. There's always someone who's a
tad bit better.
Source: for Make It Happen Mar 22, 2011