Definitions

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

  • adjective Lazy; indolent.
  • adjective Of no use; pointless or superfluous.
  • adjective Ineffective; futile. synonym: vain.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • 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.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Being at leisure or ease; unemployed; indolent; idle.

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

  • adjective Resulting in no effect.
  • adjective Reluctant to work or to exert oneself.
  • adjective Having no reason for being (raison d’être); having no point, reason, or purpose.

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

  • adjective disinclined to work or exertion
  • adjective producing no result or effect
  • adjective serving no useful purpose; having no excuse for being

Etymologies

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

[Latin ōtiōsus, idle, from ōtium, leisure.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin ōtiōsus ("idle"), from ōtium ("ease")

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Examples

Comments

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  • "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

    March 5, 2008

  • "...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

    March 16, 2008

  • 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".

    April 19, 2011

  • In addition, otiose means redundant (Oxford English Dictionary).

    September 26, 2011