Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- adj. Having no useful result.
- adj. Trifling and frivolous; idle: the futile years after her artistic peak.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. Incapable of producing results; useless; not successful; not worth attempting.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- adj. Talkative; loquacious; tattling.
- adj. Of no importance; answering no useful end; useless; vain; worthless.
from The 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.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adj. producing no result or effect
- adj. unproductive of success
Etymologies
Examples
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It will cost millions in marketing and promotion, or what I call a futile attempt and waste of shareholder equity.
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Cape Town after the union staged a go-slow following what it termed futile wage negotiations.
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Based on this dubious proposition, the researchers bizarrely advocate what they call "futile busyness, namely, busyness serving no purpose other than to prevent idleness."
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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
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Instead, almost a year has been wasted in futile attempts to appease the Republicans and the Mass. disaster has struck.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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How futile is it to bash one party with the other?
Matthew Yglesias » Steve Austria (R-OH) Doesn’t Know When the Depression Happened
bilby commented on the word futile
Confucious say, futile not enough to fix roof.
March 22, 2011
pqnga commented on the word futile
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
March 22, 2011