English

Suffix

-less

1. Lacking (something); without (something).
   • 2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, “The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist:

     The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, essentially what today we might term a frameless magnifying glass or plain glass paperweight.

Usage notes

• Adjectives formed using -less often form nouns by the addition of -ness (-lessness), but generally do not form nouns by the addition of other noun-forming endings. The suffix -lessness means "absence".

Antonyms

• -ed
• -ful
• -y

Derived terms

Translations