Contextualizebeta

bloodless

adj

Etymology

From Middle English blodles, from Old English blōdlēas (“bloodless”). Cognate with Dutch bloedeloos (“bloodless”), German blutlos (“bloodless”), Danish blodløs (“bloodless”), Swedish blodlös (“bloodless”), Icelandic blóðlaus (“bloodless”). By surface analysis, blood + -less.

  1. derived from blōdlēas
  2. derived from blodles

Definitions

  1. Lacking blood

    Lacking blood; ashen, anaemic.

    • My bloodleſſe bodie waxeth chill and colde, And with my blood my life ſlides through my wound, My ſoule begins to take her flight to hell, And ſummones all my ſences to depart: […]
    • Thou dost not slumber: see, thy two sons’ heads, Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here: Thy other banish’d son, with this dear sight Struck pale and bloodless; and thy brother, I, Even like a stony image, cold and numb.
    • The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume.

  2. Taking place without loss of blood.

    • a bloodless conquest; a bloodless coup d'état; a bloodless revolution; a bloodless victory
    • Now and then a gaudy peacock would run from his shelter in the lauhala trees, but no wild boars came out, so we returned from our raid bloodless and spoilless.

  3. Lacking emotion, passion or vivacity.

    • Those Philharmonic subscribers who considered Guest Conductor Igor Stravinsky too bloodless and ascetic […] last week found his successor, Georges Enesco, more to their taste.
    • Many of them are leaving us — the words. Gone into hiding […] Now they lurk, uncaged, behind other words, behind trending, brittle, bloodless little wokeisms […]
    • There is plenty of commentary, even among users of other platforms, about how Threads is bloodless (and owned by Mark Zuckerberg), Mastodon is inscrutable, and Bluesky is humorless.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for bloodless. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA