Word.ws English Dictionary

boneless

boneless adjective: without bones, especially as pertaining to meat or poultry prepared for eating.

Adjective

boneless (comparative more boneless, superlative most boneless)

  1. Without bones, especially as pertaining to meat or poultry prepared for eating.
    • Near-synonyms: boned, deboned
    • boneless chicken
    Synonyms:
    boned, deboned
    Antonyms:
    unboned, bone-in
  2. (US, humorous) Without pizza crust; without pizza bones.
  3. (UK, figuratively) Lacking strength, courage, or resolve.
    • I'm scared, I'm just boneless with fright.1916, P. G. Wodehouse, chapter 18, in Uneasy Money
    • I remember, when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum's circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit … which I most desired to see was the one described as "The Boneless Wonder." My parents judged that the spectacle would be too revolting and...1931, Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 13 May
  4. (informal) Of a couch, cushionlike due to lacking a hard internal frame.

boneless meaning in Telugu and Tagalog

boneless in Telugu

boneless
ఎముకలేని emukalēni

boneless in Tagalog

without bones
hukhok

Examples of boneless in a sentence

  • boneless, skinless chicken
  • The packers were always originating such schemes—they had what they called "boneless hams," which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings.1905 April–October, Upton Sinclair, chapter XIV, in The Jungle, New York, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 26 February 1906...
  • The fish was described as being 'Made From Flaky Tender Boneless Filets and the chicken as 'Delicious French Fried to a Golden Brown, Served Disjointed.'1954, Ian Fleming, “Allumeuse”, in Live and Let Die, London: Pan Books, published 1957, page 107:
  • Had the Green consortium made a straight bid, boneless fund managers would easily have outvoted private investors.2006 November 11, Graham Searjeant, “Loyalty pays off for M&S shareholders”, in The Times, London:
  • In his final years he [John Ogdon] gave an interview to an American journalist who noticed that "his handshake is a boneless fadeaway["].2014 May 11, Ivan Hewett, “Piano Man: a Life of John Ogdon by Charles Beauclerk, review: A new biography of the great British pianist whose...

All 15 example sentences with boneless

Synonyms of boneless

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of boneless

Forms of boneless

comparativemore boneless
superlativemost boneless

Origin of boneless

From Middle English bonles, banles, from Old English bānlēas (“boneless”), from Proto-Germanic *bainalausaz, equivalent to bone + -less. Cognate with Scots baneless (“boneless”), Dutch beenloos (“boneless; legless”), German beinlos (“legless”), Swedish benlös (“boneless”), Icelandic beinlaus (“boneless”).

Words formed from boneless

Questions about boneless

What does boneless mean?
Boneless means without bones, especially as pertaining to meat or poultry prepared for eating.
What is boneless in Telugu?
Boneless in Telugu is ఎముకలేని (emukalēni). See Boneless meaning in Telugu.
How do you use boneless in a sentence?
boneless, skinless chicken
What part of speech is boneless?
Boneless is an adjective.

Words near boneless in the dictionary

  1. Bonehill
  2. bonehouse
  3. bonehouses
  4. bonejarring
  5. bonejarringly
  6. boneless
  7. boneless lean beef trimmings
  8. bonelessly
  9. bonelessness
  10. bonelet
  11. bonelets

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: boneless (page history and authors); ఎముకలేని (Telugu) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-boneless.wav.

Cite this entry: “boneless.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/boneless. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.