Word.ws English Dictionary

contextless

contextless adjective: without context.

Adjective

contextless (not comparable)

  1. without context
    • Like their fellow Glaswegians in Arab Strap, Scatter like to add contextless and slightly cryptic monologues to their music--an unfortunate predilection, since the delivery usually sounds forced and overstrict alongside the impulsive swells of the band's free-folk drone.2006 March 24, Mia Lily Clarke, Monica Kendrick, Brian McManus, “Short Takes on Recent Releases”, in Chicago Reader
    • What is a problem, though, is that the fictional math in WN is extremely important but also extremely vague, comprising mostly repeated and contextless verbiage--"If I could only establish its K-reducibility with the aid of a suitable calibrator set!"2000 December 22, David Foster Wallace, “FICTION: Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama”, in Science, volume 290, number 5500, →DOI, pages 2263–2267

Origin of contextless

From context + -less.

Words formed from contextless

Questions about contextless

What does contextless mean?
Contextless means without context.
What part of speech is contextless?
Contextless is an adjective.

Words near contextless in the dictionary

  1. context-sensitive grammars
  2. contexted
  3. contextful
  4. contextfulness
  5. contexting
  6. contextless
  7. contextlessness
  8. contextomies
  9. contextomize
  10. contextomized
  11. contextomizes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: contextless (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: “contextless.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/contextless. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.