Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Having a beneficial use; serviceable: a useful kitchen gadget.
- adj. Being of practical use: a useful job; useful members of society.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Being of use, advantage, or profit; valuable for use; suited or adapted to a purpose; producing or having power to produce good; beneficial; profitable; serviceable.
- Useful invention. See
invention
Wiktionary
- adj. Having a practical or beneficial use.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Full of use, advantage, or profit; producing, or having power to produce, good; serviceable for any end or object; helpful toward advancing any purpose; beneficial; profitable; advantageous.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. being of use or service
- adj. having a useful function
Etymologies
- From use + -ful. (Wiktionary)
Examples
“In this workshop, children are invited to make educational and useful toys - useful in the sense that they help with a childs early development, providing stimulation, exercise, use of the senses, and learning of skills.”
“Let a child be employed -- take an interest in his employment, let him fancy that he is useful -- _and he is useful_, he is laying in a stock of health.”
“Exactly the same difficulty arises, when we endeavour to account for the development of the moral sense or conscience in savage man; for although the _practice_ of benevolence, honesty, or truth, may have been useful to the tribe possessing these virtues, that does not at all account for the peculiar _sanctity_, attached to actions which each tribe considers right and moral, as contrasted with the very different feelings with which they regard what is merely _useful_.”
Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection A Series of Essays
“Carnot’s experiments also showed that thermodynamic laws are essentially economic formulations of physical relations, for the terms ’useful’ and ’unavailable’ energy refer to the economy’s ability to use energy to upgrade the organizational state of natural resources into useful goods and services.”
“The word useful came out with a spiteful, bitter twist.”
“Stalin was possibly an atheist however I doubt he would even consider the term useful as he was a communist above all.”
“The right invented the term useful idiot to describe those who were being used and manipulated by the commies.”
“Read THE ANTI-WAR NUMBERS GAME, archived below. tadair919 you ever hear the term useful idiots? that's when people ally themselves with the naive because they dutifully tow the same line. it's ...”
“-- Lang Sui Now that's what I call a useful letter.”
The Wall Street Journal: All (Chinese) Roads Lead to Bureaucracy
“But first we must agree on what we describe as useful- useful to whom, to what, for what ?”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘useful’.
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JURI - patent law
admissible, entry, allowable, fact, lapse, term, title, notes, abstract, absolute grounds ..., acquisition of th..., action for revoca... and 338 more...
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Tati's list
comfortable
comfortable, avocado, avoid, beautiful, beer, bear, brief, breath, bug, bias, burn, case and 97 more...
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EU Buzz - Lisbon Treaty
All words of the Lisbon Treaty
(Persons' names, foreign and grammatical words have been eliminated, MWEs have been split up into individual words. Capitalization has been retained if r...conferral, stateless, person, voting, right, subsidiarity, Latvia, Malta, Slovenia, Lithuania, Finland, Estonia and 2614 more...
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EN - autological words and phrases
Words and phrases expressing a property which they also possess themselves: "noun" is a noun, "English" is English, etc. If W means W AND W is (a) W, then W is an autological item. Very often but n...
noun, polysyllabic, abbrv., word, common, English, lovely, sesquipedalian, heterological, short, term, terminus technicus and 63 more...
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Resident Pipsiculturalist Makes Huge ...
See comments on pipsiculture and homosexuality, which have nothing to do with each other except that I read comments on them at around the same time on the same day.
See also the list ...heterosexuality, homosexuality, agriculture, argumentative, that, article, thus, make, do, the, interesting, like and 106 more...
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eggplantia5's Words
scintillate, marvel, cranberry, oscillate, triumph, bamboozle, grimace, magical, book, hexagon, cipher, compendium and 2727 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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Basic English Vocabulary
Very basic words for ESL students.
a, abandon, ability, able, abortion, about, above, abroad, absence, absolute, absolutely, absorb and 4334 more...
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feeling words
twitterpated, loquacious, ambiguous, pensive, sluggish, anxious, adventurous, curious, abandoned, absent-minded, abrasive, abused and 653 more...
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The Jumblies
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to...sieve, winter, morn, stormy, round, drowned, cried, aloud, button, fig, sea, far and 113 more...
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Reflexive words
Words that describe themselves (at least as displayed below). Also called autological or homological words, as listed by dann and tthorley.
sereneness, undulate, fidgety, fijiti, narrow, this, splendacious, ugly, short, terse, sesquipedalian, spellable and 67 more...
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Obvious, but powerful
thank you, plan, useful, bond, dear, picture, home, peace, truth, street, nothing, spoken and 7 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for useful.
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