Word.ws English Dictionary

rudderless

rudderless adjective: without a rudder.

Adjective

rudderless (comparative more rudderless, superlative most rudderless)

  1. Without a rudder.
  2. (figuratively) Lacking guidance or direction.
    • Their deaths were sobering not merely because of the searingly unbearable wrench of losing those two wonderful people, but because it left me exposed as rudderless.2005, Sean Dooley, The Big Twitch, Sydney: Allen and Unwin, page 23
    • As Christian Wolmar said in RAIL 990, our railway is "leaderless and rudderless", and drifting inexorably towards the rocks of total chaos.2023 September 6, Nigel Harris, “Comment: Leaderless and rudderless”, in RAIL, number 991, page 3

Forms of rudderless

comparativemore rudderless
superlativemost rudderless

Origin of rudderless

From rudder + -less.

Words formed from rudderless

Questions about rudderless

What does rudderless mean?
Rudderless means without a rudder.
What part of speech is rudderless?
Rudderless is an adjective.

Words near rudderless in the dictionary

  1. rudderfishes
  2. rudderhead
  3. rudderheads
  4. rudderhole
  5. rudderholes
  6. rudderless
  7. rudderlessly
  8. rudderlessness
  9. rudderlike
  10. rudderon
  11. rudderons

Source and license

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