Word.ws English Dictionary

foodless

foodless adjective: lacking food; without food.

Adjective

foodless (not comparable)

  1. (rare) Lacking food; without food.
    • Why does the raven cry aloud & no eye pities her? / Why fall the sparrow & the robin in the foodless winter?c. 1807, William Blake, Vala, or The Four Zoas in Blake: Complete Poems, edited by W. H. Stevenson, Routledge, 3rd edition, 2007, p. 321, lines 187-8
    • You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk. There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go...1933 January 9, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter III, in Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Victor Gollancz […], →OCLC

Origin of foodless

From Middle English fodeles, equivalent to food + -less.

Words formed from foodless

Questions about foodless

What does foodless mean?
Foodless means lacking food; without food.
What part of speech is foodless?
Foodless is an adjective.

Words near foodless in the dictionary

  1. foodists
  2. foodland
  3. foodlands
  4. foodlegger
  5. foodleggers
  6. foodless
  7. foodlessly
  8. foodlessness
  9. foodlike
  10. foodloaf
  11. foodmonger

Source and license

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