Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adverb Regardless.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective proscribed, nonstandard Regardless.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adverb regardless; a combination of irrespective and regardless sometimes used humorously

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Probably blend of irrespective (of) and regardless.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Probably a blend of irrespective and regardless; surface analysis is ir- +‎ regardless.

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Examples

Comments

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  • Regardless is sufficient.

    December 24, 2006

  • Irregardless is so fantastically pleonastic!

    January 16, 2007

  • THIS WORD SUCKS! IT IS WRONG AND BAD!!!

    January 31, 2007

  • A friend on Flickr heard this monstrosity in a meeting. Interestingly, another Flickr friend heard it used during a conference call the same week. Worrying isn't it?

    April 15, 2007

  • I hate this fake-ass, non-word so much!! My boss used this while we were on a conference call, so I couldn't even subtly correct her!

    PS I'm only "listing" it as my least favorite "word" ever!!

    April 18, 2007

  • See: http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/irregardless

    August 27, 2007

  • Doesn't that just kill you, arby? You dislike a word so much that you have to put it on your "I Hate These Words" list, but you dislike it too much to have it show up as one of "your" words.

    A Wordie conundrum.

    August 28, 2007

  • It could be worse... My father claims to've had a drill sergeant in the army who used "disirregardless" with some frequency. (I'm not even listin' it... 8>)

    August 28, 2007

  • Wow. Amazing. That one just makes your brain hurt.

    August 28, 2007

  • That's it, I'm officially an anti-disirregardlessist.

    August 28, 2007

  • Regardless of what you have heard, “irregardless�? is a redundancy. The suffix “-less�? on the end of the word already makes the word negative. It doesn’t need the negative prefix “ir-�? to make it even more negative.

    October 22, 2007

  • Actually, in many languages, double negatives don't resolve to positive. This was true of English for a long time, although not really in modernity. In Spanish, double negatives are used frequently.

    October 22, 2007

  • Irregardless is a pretty word regardless of it's total lack of regard for formal usage.

    October 22, 2007

  • I would like to register my strong, but polite, disagreement with palooka. irregardless is an abomination.

    October 22, 2007

  • Ditto that, sionnach. Sorry, palooka.

    October 22, 2007

  • Are there other words with the same "mouthfeel" that are as pretty to your ears, palooka?

    October 22, 2007

  • A "mouthfeel" list--that's a good idea!

    October 22, 2007

  • Irregardless is my kind of word; it beautifully uncoils then strikes you with its impact, its payload of meaning. Regardless is just a word you happen to stumble over on the way to the rest of the sentence, though it's a perfectly good, functional word.

    Irregardless of that, I respect your opinions.

    Most of my lists are populated with mouthfeel words and/or words with poetic impact I think.

    October 22, 2007

  • I hate this word! I see it all the time and it makes my piss boil!

    October 22, 2007

  • That's gotta hurt.

    October 22, 2007

  • That's a beautiful phrasing for feeling stabby, yarb.

    It kind of makes my piss boil too. :)

    P.S. why piss and not blood? Or hell--bile! "It makes my bile boil"? Come on, it's fun.

    October 23, 2007

  • Man, this is an endangered, beat down word! I'm starting the "Irregardless Preservation Society" to promote the acceptance & use of irregardless in our society. We will insist that no sentence containing the word irregardless will under any circumstances be erased, defaced or recycled until the population of irregardless words in the wild is stabilized & naturally begins to grow.

    I urge all of you caring wordies to do your part to save irregardless!

    October 23, 2007

  • *barfs*

    October 23, 2007

  • I think one's piss is the coolest bodily fluid to boil in anger. Blood was the original, but "it makes my blood boil" became uncool - associated with old-fashioned moral rectitude. "Piss" is the modern, demotic version, for people who can't say anything without tacit self-deprecation. When you say something makes your piss boil, you're acknowledging the huffiness inherent in the precursor phrase. "Bile" has the virtue of variety but unfortunately quite a few people don't know what it is.

    Anyhow, good luck with your campaign, palooka! You may be alone, but I admire your passion, irregardless.

    October 23, 2007

  • Aw, man. Palooka, you're serious? *red pen in twitching hand*

    Well, I guess yarb has a point. I admire your passion, if not the actual word, which feels like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.

    October 23, 2007

  • The word that is not a word.

    December 4, 2007

  • Everything I've ever known tells me this is a non-word, but if it's spoken, it becomes a word, doesn't it? I have a dear friend who says it often, I thought she'd made it up, so here I've been better informed.

    December 4, 2007

  • Sounds like a Bushism although the etymology goes back a bit further. I don't mind this one actually. I don't have any trouble mentally editing it back to regardless.

    December 4, 2007

  • Irregardless is not a word. End of story.

    March 11, 2009

  • 30 helens agree: Irregardless is not a word.

    March 11, 2009

  • Let's just call it madeupical, then.

    March 11, 2009

  • 'Blurp,' said the Snarken, biggardly. Next you'll be saying vitamin D is not a real vitamin.

    March 12, 2009

  • What's a vitamin? You made that up.

    March 12, 2009

  • Soon this word will just unvanish away.

    See also: irrigate

    November 3, 2009

  • tihs wrod cakrcs me up. adoybny hvae a fritoave lsit of cmonmloy mlsepisled and msueisd wrods?

    November 10, 2010

  • regardlesser, unheedless, uncareless...

    November 10, 2010

  • Irregardless has been around since 1735

    http://goo.gl/ZzzTf edit, ok, actually, that book was initially written in 1735, but it has crap added to it over the years.

    Next book in chronological order is 1863 The Knickerbocker http://goo.gl/DNuIz

    Irregardless of that, the word irregardless is not going away anytime soon.

    February 10, 2013

  • Seanahan made a very good point, earlier in this thread. (Uh, six years earlier, actually. I'm kind of late to this discussion.) In some languages, double negatives are interpreted as negatives. In fact, some dialects of English do the same thing. You could say, for example, "That ain't no moon!" and it would mean the same thing as "That's no moon!"

    There's a larger question, which is whether it's better for a language to interpret double negatives as positives or as negatives. The former is more logical; the latter is more natural. I wish we could come up with a rule that's both logical AND natural, but I don't know what that would be.

    February 10, 2013

  • I aint never making no more comments on this word.

    February 10, 2013

  • Triple negative phrase score - 201 points.

    February 11, 2013

  • ig-norirregardless

    regardsome

    Look-at-all!

    Seenone

    beforward

    February 11, 2013