Word.ws English Dictionary

botleas

botleas adjective: too grievous to be atoned for by the payment of a bōt or bōte; irredeemable, unpardonable.

Adjective

botleas (not comparable)

  1. (Anglo-Saxon England) Too grievous to be atoned for by the payment of a bōt or bōte; irredeemable, unpardonable.
    • Persons guilty of the botleas crimes had no right to any particular punishment. Thus the convicted could not “complain if a foot was taken instead of his eyes, or if he was hanged instead of beheaded”.1991, Carla Ann Hage Johnson, “Entitled to Clemency: Mercy in the Criminal Law”, in Law and Philosophy, X, № 1 (February 1991), page 112

Origin of botleas

Learned borrowing from Old English bōtlēas (“unpardonable”). Doublet of bootless.

Questions about botleas

What does botleas mean?
Botleas means too grievous to be atoned for by the payment of a bōt or bōte; irredeemable, unpardonable.
What part of speech is botleas?
Botleas is an adjective.

Words near botleas in the dictionary

  1. botijo
  2. botijos
  3. Botilao
  4. botkin
  5. botkins
  6. botleas
  7. botless
  8. botlessness
  9. Botley
  10. Botley and North Hinksey
  11. botlhanka

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: botleas (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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