Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Destitute of members; simple or undivided.

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

  • adjective Without members; limbless.
  • adjective set theory Without members; empty or null.

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

  • adjective of a group or set having no members

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

member +‎ -less

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Examples

  • The memberless organization, which is composed of small and very secretive cells, has burned suburban homes and condos from Long Island to San Diego.

    From Green to Black 2008

  • Banditry was in the air at the moment for that morning the now memberless trunk of the American missionary had been found at the gates of the Baptist compound.

    The Complete Stories Waugh, Evelyn 1998

  • The self-affirmation of [even] a memberless unity implies the repudiation of all that does not enter into the character: in other words, it must be multiple as a preliminary to being itself.

    The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

  • If it had to direct itself to a memberless unity, it would be dereasoned: what could it say or know of such an object?

    The Six Enneads. Plotinus 1952

  • If anywhere truly exemplified in plants, it is only in the lowest and simplest, where the being is a structural unit, a single cell, memberless and organless, though organic, -- the same thing as those cells of which all the more complex plants are built up, and with which every plant and (structurally) every animal began its development.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 34, August, 1860 Various

  • Africa lies on the surface of the ocean, a huge torso of a continent, headless, memberless, inert.

    Influences of Geographic Environment On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography Ellen Churchill Semple 1897

  • She takes from the honeycomb a little memberless live thing; she brings it wings and feet, brightens and beautifies it with quaint variety of colour: -- and

    Marius the Epicurean — Volume 2 Walter Pater 1866

Comments

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  • Bobbitted?

    March 8, 2008

  • Mollusque, that reference always makes me cringe.

    March 8, 2008