chiefless
chiefless adjective: without a chief; leaderless.
Adjective
chiefless (not comparable)
- Without a chief; leaderless.
- No great clan held rule there; it was filled and disputed by small septs, and broken remnants, and what they call "chiefless folk," driven into the wild country about the springs of Forth and Teith by the advance of the Campbells.1886 May 1 – July 31, Robert Louis Stevenson, “In Balquidder”, in Kidnapped, being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: […], London; Paris: Cassell & Company, published 1886...
Origin of chiefless
From chief + -less. Piecewise doublet of chefless and headless.
Words formed from chiefless
Questions about chiefless
- What does chiefless mean?
- Chiefless means without a chief; leaderless.
- What part of speech is chiefless?
- Chiefless is an adjective.
Words near chiefless in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: chiefless (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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Cite this entry: “chiefless.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chiefless. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
