nameless
Appearance
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Middle English nameles, equivalent to name + -less. Cognate with Dutch naamloos (“nameless”), German namenlos (“nameless”), Danish navnløs (“nameless”), Swedish namnlös (“nameless”), Icelandic nafnlaus (“nameless, anonymous”).
Pronunciation
[edit]Adjective
[edit]nameless (not comparable)
- Not having a name.
- Synonym: unnamed
- Environmental DNA analysis suggests that the number of species of bacteria that remain nameless to date may well be on the order of many thousands.
- Whose name is unknown; unidentified or obscured.
- Synonyms: anonymous, deidentified
- The culprits shall remain nameless here, as some names have been changed to protect the guilty; just don't let it happen again.
- Unable to be described or expressed.
- Synonyms: see Thesaurus:indescribable
- a nameless unease
- a nameless fear
- 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, “The Plain of Kôr”, in She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC, page 126:
- Minute grew into minute, and still there was no sign of life, nor did the curtain move; but I felt the gaze of the unknown being sinking through and through me, and filling me with a nameless terror, till the perspiration stood in beads upon my brow.
- (dated, of a child) Illegitimate.
- Synonyms: see Thesaurus:illegitimate
- 1953, James Baldwin, “Elizabeth’s Prayer”, in Go Tell It on the Mountain, New York, N.Y.: Dell Publishing Co., published October 1970, →OCLC, part 2 (The Prayers of the Saints), page 175:
- He said that he would cherish her until the grave, and that he would love her nameless son as though he were his own flesh.
Derived terms
[edit]Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]having no name
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Noun
[edit]the nameless
- (obsolete) Vulva.
- Synonyms: name-it-not; see also Thesaurus:vulva
- 1896, John Stephen Farmer, “Hérison”, in Vocabula Amatoria, page 156:
- Hérison, m. The female pudendum; ‘the nameless’.
Further reading
[edit]- “name-it-not n.”, in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green, 2016–present
Anagrams
[edit]Categories:
- English terms inherited from Middle English
- English terms derived from Middle English
- English terms suffixed with -less
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English adjectives
- English uncomparable adjectives
- English terms with usage examples
- English terms with collocations
- English terms with quotations
- English dated terms
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
- English nouns with unknown or uncertain plurals
- English terms with obsolete senses