Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Being at rest or ease; not at work; unemployed; inactive; idle.
- Made, done, or performed in a leisurely, half-hearted way; perfunctory, negligent; careless; hence, ineffective; vain; futile; to no purpose.
Wiktionary
- adj. Resulting in no effect.
- adj. Reluctant to work or to exert oneself.
- adj. Having no reason for being (raison d’être); having no point, reason, or purpose.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Being at leisure or ease; unemployed; indolent; idle.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. disinclined to work or exertion
- adj. producing no result or effect
- adj. serving no useful purpose; having no excuse for being
Etymologies
- Latin ōtiōsus, idle, from ōtium, leisure.
Examples
“I'm sorry to be such a scrotum, but did you mean to type "otiose" or "obtuse"?”
“Still, I pack too much, a huge duffle crammed with triple and quadruple of everything: shirts, shorts, footwear, rainwear, and all sorts of otiose extras I know I will never use.”
The Huffington Post: Richard Bangs: Following Brad and Angelina to Namibia, Part I
“Instead the Tories plan to ring-fence NHS spending, thus keeping hordes of adminstrators who are otherwise otiose beavering away at nothing very much.”
“For the rest of the year, I fought with my father who felt that a piano was an otiose flamboyance of the upper classes.”
“For all anyone knows, al-Qaida's gloating in its murderous glossy magazine, Inspire, and Niall Ferguson's talk of a caliphate are just as otiose as Blair's jawdropping exhortation, given his legacy of mayhem, for the west to show "the courage of our convictions, and the self-confident belief we can achieve them".”
The Guardian: Women are often the losers when the west weighs in | Catherine Bennett
“The sooner we quit fiddling with otiose sanctions against Iran, the sooner we can begin crafting containment and deterrence strategies that are actually effective.”
The Huffington Post: Michael Hughes: Who Cares If Iran Goes Nuclear?
“I'm suprised, there's no otiose argument on the decline of M Night Shyamalan's movies yet.”
Twisted New Poster for Shyamalan's The Happening « FirstShowing.net
“A propos of QUANGOs, there are other elements of Government which are surely otiose.”
“And if this is how law is in future to be made, then one can see why going to all that expense of having hours and hours of Parliamentary discussion on the mere matter of the odd £110 billion here or there might be thought otiose.”
“I replied briskly but at length to ripostes which focused on my style of registering my complaint, (which was to analyse what it might mean to be a philosopher at some length) to be verbose, prolix, otiose and smart-assed.”
Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Reduce Vandalism on Pages - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘otiose’.
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Collected Words - List 2
I've been saving these words FOR YEARS. Now, I've found Wordie
gasconade, zaccheus, spoor, precentor, bombazine, otiose, khamsin, bruited, viva voce, whilom, lenitive, ebullition and 244 more...
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Logolepsy
"Luciferous Logolepsy is a collection of over 9,000 obscure English words. Though the definition of an 'English' word might seem to be straightforward, it is not. There exist so many adopted, deriv...
Anschauung, Areopagus, Argus, Briarean, Dei gratia, Dei judicium, Deo volente, Duecento, Foehn, Geflugelte Worte, Gegenschein, Hakenkreuz and 9230 more...
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cicatrix
scar tissue
minatory, naira, Cluniac, embracive, prolix, hierophant, timorous, adduce, veracious, dysphoric, sang-froid, vitiate and 414 more...
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tatterdemalion's list
chrysalis, colloquy, peroration, syncretism, dickering, gamelan, dictatress, adventurism, untenable, presumption of fa..., lovelorn, bawdily and 47 more...
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Words I Intend to use.
selectarian, solastalgia, niefling, eldritch, santagnostic, laborious, obstreperous, quibble, inusitate, cacology, tmesis, cacoethes and 50 more...
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Better Words
Extremely fond of adjectives. To conquer phlegmatic speech and indolent phrases.
auric, hemispherical, quadrivial, adumbral, weighty, deuced, aliquot, commendable, anterior, osculant, ferly, enceinte and 26 more...
biocon In addition, otiose means redundant (Oxford English Dictionary). Sep 26, 2011
duckbill Otious (from Latin otium, ease or rest) is an alternate spelling.
An important shade of meaning is without painstaking:
"(Jesus Christ would warn his listeners) against the otiose attention of curiosity or mere intellectual interest, and would fix upon their minds a sense of their moral responsibility for the effects produced by what they heard."
Paley speaks of "otious assent".
Dean Alford speaks of an "otiose and unprofitable way of keeping the Sabbath". Apr 19, 2011
chained_bear "...in this single instance he did fuss, trying to make it perform miracles, urging the sun to shed a diffused and even illumination, uttering otiose explanations."
--P. O'Brian, The Commodore, 75 Mar 16, 2008
knitandpurl "But what I demanded from this performance—as from the visit to Balbec and the visit to Venice for which I had so intensely longed—was something quite different from pleasure: verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me by any trivial incident—even though it were to cause me bodily suffering—of my otiose existence."
-- Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust, translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Revised by D.J. Enright, p 17 of the Modern Library paperback edition Mar 5, 2008