do-nothing
do-nothing adjective: doing nothing, not taking any action.
Adjective
do-nothing
- Doing nothing, not taking any action.
- It became clear that a chronic do-nothing approach to the problem's management would no longer suffice.
- Manchester needs more railway capacity. Just how that is provided until the new platforms are built for HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail, I will leave for the experts, but a do-nothing approach is not going to be helpful and quite justifiably will create more arguments that the North is being...2020 April 22, “Letters: Open Access: Castlefield conundrum”, in Rail, page 31
Noun
do-nothing (plural do-nothings)
Synonyms of do-nothing
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Antonyms
Forms of do-nothing
| plural | do-nothings |
|---|
Origin of do-nothing
Essentially deverbal in nature, albeit not from a unitary phrasal verb, but from the phrase do nothing, which English expresses as a verb phrase containing a complement.
Words formed from do-nothing
Questions about do-nothing
- What does do-nothing mean?
- Do-nothing means doing nothing, not taking any action.
- What part of speech is do-nothing?
- Do-nothing can be an adjective or a noun.
Words near do-nothing in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: do-nothing (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: “do-nothing.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/do-nothing. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.