Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Without function or office.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Destitute of function, or of an appropriate organ. Darwin.

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

  • adjective lacking a function

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

function +‎ -less

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Examples

  • Your claim that they are 'intrinsically functionless' is implausibly strong, given that functionality is always ... er, a function of contexts, which is to say, out and out extrinsic), and the radical transformation of contexts is the very thing at issue.

    More Aesthetics Hal Duncan 2007

  • Keynes made it clear that he looked forward to a gradual annihilation of the "functionless" rentier, rather than to any sort of sudden upheaval (Keynes 1936: pp. 375-76; see also Hazlitt [1959] 1973: pp. 379-84).

    Mises Dailies 2009

  • Evolutionary biologists are sometimes challenged with arguments about functionless rudimentary stages or the impossibility of complex adaptive evolution.

    Crossroads 2009

  • Evolutionary biologists are sometimes challenged with arguments about functionless rudimentary stages or the impossibility of complex adaptive evolution.

    Crossroads 2009

  • "He (or she) is a passive and functionless figure, remarkable only on his capacity to share, without effort or even without appreciable risk, in the gains from the growth by which the technostructure measures its success," according to Galbraith.

    The Non-Economist's Economist James Grant 2010

  • Mute, disposable, functionless, they are the survivors of a specific and irretrievable event.

    I Don't Believe in Outer Space – review 2011

  • BUT ... our “hero” sobered up in the morning and, discovering that the phone was now functionless, he set about prising the thing open.

    The Volokh Conspiracy » Is It a Crime to Receive an Item That You Know Belongs to a Third Party? 2010

  • His vibrato sometimes sounded like an intermediate student's -- so tense and inconsistent as to be functionless.

    In review: Henschel Quartet 2010

  • It was a fascinating look at “locked-in syndrome,” the situation where a fully cognizant person becomes trapped in a functionless body.

    Diving bell : Bev Vincent 2008

  • I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but it's definitely just a functionless heap of gray matter.

    John Baxter: Scientists Cite Uselessness as Reason Unused 90% of Human Brain Not Used 2010

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