Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Lacking will-power; having no will or volition; not volitional.
  • Involuntary.

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

  • adjective Of a person, lacking volition, not exercising one's will
  • adjective Of an action, involuntary
  • adjective intestate; to die without a legal will governing one's property or estate.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • While you may not share my love for the semi-dead, you might agree with this: most of us are surrounded by these mute, will-less, dumb, sometimes evil and dangerous brutes everyday.

    Joe Waters: How Nonprofits Can Stop a Zombie Apocalypse Joe Waters 2011

  • While you may not share my love for the semi-dead, you might agree with this: most of us are surrounded by these mute, will-less, dumb, sometimes evil and dangerous brutes everyday.

    Joe Waters: How Nonprofits Can Stop a Zombie Apocalypse Joe Waters 2011

  • While you may not share my love for the semi-dead, you might agree with this: most of us are surrounded by these mute, will-less, dumb, sometimes evil and dangerous brutes everyday.

    Joe Waters: How Nonprofits Can Stop a Zombie Apocalypse Joe Waters 2011

  • While you may not share my love for the semi-dead, you might agree with this: most of us are surrounded by these mute, will-less, dumb, sometimes evil and dangerous brutes everyday.

    Joe Waters: How Nonprofits Can Stop a Zombie Apocalypse Joe Waters 2011

  • Do you see any similarities between Dewey's "experience freed ... from factors that subordinate an experience as it is directly had to something beyond itself" — when the "something beyond itself" is understood as the 1,001 things we can pursue relative to this or that object of perception — and Schopenhauer's pure, will-less perception?

    Pure Experience 2010

  • While you may not share my love for the semi-dead, you might agree with this: most of us are surrounded by these mute, will-less, dumb, sometimes evil and dangerous brutes everyday.

    Joe Waters: How Nonprofits Can Stop a Zombie Apocalypse Joe Waters 2011

  • It was depressing to see a simple appeal for Westerners to listen to Muslim women deliberately distorted into a representation of all Muslim women as meek, will-less beings in need of rescue.

    Naomi Wolf: What Do Muslim Women Want? 2009

  • We want to feel adult, responsible, not will-less puppets to be shoved this way and that.

    These Times, February 2008 2008

  • In this view, Allmers becomes a type of what we may roughly call the “free moral agent”; Eyolf, a type of humanity conceived as passive and suffering, thrust will-less into existence, with boundless aspirations and cruelly limited powers; Rita, a type of the egoistic instinct which is “a consuming fire”; and Asta, a type of the beneficent love which is possible only so long as it is exempt from “the law of change.”

    Little Eyolf 2008

  • In this view, Allmers becomes a type of what we may roughly call the “free moral agent”; Eyolf, a type of humanity conceived as passive and suffering, thrust will-less into existence, with boundless aspirations and cruelly limited powers; Rita, a type of the egoistic instinct which is “a consuming fire”; and Asta, a type of the beneficent love which is possible only so long as it is exempt from “the law of change.”

    Little Eyolf 2008

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