Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Having no pity; merciless.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Without pity; hard-hearted.
- Exciting no pity; unpitied.
- Synonyms Merciless, cruel, ruthless, inexorable, unmerciful, unpitying.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Destitute of pity; hard-hearted; merciless
- adjective Exciting no pity.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective having, or showing, no
pity ;merciless - adjective having no
kindly feelings ;unkind
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective without mercy or pity
- adjective deficient in humane and kindly feelings
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Zoology, he said, and those sciences which deal with man, continually insist upon what they call the pitiless law of struggle for existence.
Mutual Aid; a factor of evolution Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin 1881
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Whatever His aim, it had been past expression pitiless of Him, Him who had at His command thousands of pleasanter ways in which to help her, thus to drive a poor unhappy girl to extremities: one, too, whose petition had not been prompted by selfish ends alone.
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The silence of gloom is merciful, shrouding one as with protection and breathing a thousand intangible sympathies; but the bright White Silence, clear and cold, under steely skies, in pitiless.
The White Silence 1900
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Before that, Amory was known as a pitiless, tart-penned TV critic for TV Guide and quick-witted essayist for Parade.
chicagotribune.com - 2009
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Yet put them together with a kind of pitiless precision and gleeful tendency to turn every downer into a music rave-up, and you've got yet another entry in what has become a really impressive body of work.
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Yet put them together with a kind of pitiless precision and gleeful tendency to turn every downer into a music rave-up, and you've got yet another entry in what has become a really impressive body of work.
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Cuba has suffered fifty years of the kind of pitiless collective punishment that Gaza has been experiencing, just in slower motion.
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The author of a soon-to-be-published translation may find it awkward to criticize a just published translation of the same work, but in the present case I can, and should, master my embarrassment; for something must be done, some lone, hoarse voice must be raised, to defend both the helpless dead poet and the credulous college student from the kind of pitiless and irresponsible paraphrast whose product [*] I am about to discuss.
On Translating Pushkin Pounding the Clavichord Nabokov, Vladimir 1964
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Nor did pro-Israel activism come easy in the early 1990s, when a "pitiless" Yitzhak Rabin expelled 415 Islamic fanatics to southern Lebanon; international pressure eventually forced him to rescind the move, setting the stage for the flowering of Hamas.
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Nor did pro-Israel activism come easy in the early 1990s, when a "pitiless" Yitzhak Rabin expelled 415 Islamic fanatics to southern Lebanon; international pressure eventually forced him to rescind the move, setting the stage for the flowering of Hamas.
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