workless

English

Etymology

From work +‎ -less.

Adjective

workless (not comparable)

1. Devoid of work.

   In the future, will machines end the need for employment and lead to a workless society?

   • 1935, Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains (U.S. title: The Last of Mr Norris), Chapter Eight, in The Berlin Stories, New York: New Directions, 1963, p. 87,^[1]

     And morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as they could best contrive […]

2. Having no work to do; unemployed.
   • 1516, Sir Thomas More, Utopia:

     The number of workless swelled to terrible dimensions

   • 2007, Helping people from workless households into work (published by the National Audit Office of the United Kingdom)

     A workless household is defined as a household that includes at least one person of working-age (men aged 16-64 years and women aged 16-59 years) where no one in the household aged 16 or over is in employment.

3. (obsolete) Not carried out in practice; not exemplified in fact.

Quotations

• 2002, Vladimir M. Zatsiorsky, Kinetics of human motion, page 462:

  Hence, workless forces are also powerless forces.

Translations

unemployed

• Bulgarian: безработен (bg) (bezraboten)