Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use futility in a sentence

17 example sentences · noun

Futility means the quality of being futile or useless. Example: “His taking the bar exam for a third time was pure futility.”

Examples of futility by meaning

nounThe quality of being futile or useless.

  • an exercise of futility
  • His taking the bar exam for a third time was pure futility.

nounSomething, especially an act, that is futile.

  • An excessive solicitude to shield those others from one's own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.1917, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, The Soul of a Bishop
  • But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly curtain falls plump! upon our bobbing heads.1920 April, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, book I (The Romantic...
  • There are moments of profound existential angst, howls of despair at the absurd futilities of war and a sneering disgust at the soul-destroying wastage of human potential.2009 September 5, Robert Clark, “Exhibition preview: Goya: Fantasies, Follies And Disasters, Manchester”, in Guardian

More sentences with futility

  • The apparent futility of trying to counteract the prevailing social forces had left her thoroughly demotivated in her daily life.From the entry demotivated
  • "Lavender Cowboy," a pseudo folk song, is a tale of futility.1991 August 31, Rudy Grillo, “Color Me Gay”, in Gay Community News, volume 19, number 7, page 10. From the entry tenderfoot
  • She has not dressed, because she despises the futility of London.1931 October 8, Virginia Woolf, The Waves, new edition, London: The Hogarth Press, published 1960, →OCLC, page 85. From the entry dress
  • That apparent self-defeating contradiction is not a Sisyphean exercise in futility devised as a cruel philosophical joke by nihilistic engineers.2020 September 7, Adam Ragusea, 0:14 from the start, in How refrigerators work, and how we all ended up with one, Macon, archived from the…. From the entry sisyphean
  • The futility of dismissing social constructionism in favor of some "real," authentic nature outside the social and linguistic.2018, Nicole Seymour, Bad Environmentalism, page 134. From the entry constructionism
  • Many feel that the continued war in Afghanistan is nothing more than an exercise in futility - and with good reason.2009 August 8, Tahereh Ghanaati, “The War in Afghanistan: An Exercise in Futility”, in Press TV. From the entry exercise in futility
  • Both despair and wanhope are generally defined as a complete loss or lack of hope and being overcome by sense of futility or defeat.2007, Michael D. C. Drout, J.R.R. Tolkien encyclopedia: scholarship and critical assessment. From the entry wanhope
  • As moderns, we have a highly developed sense of the futility, even more, of the immorality of any effort to rehabilitate the pre-Enlightenment outlook.1977, Dionysius, page 175. From the entry arcanity
  • A man who conceives and writes a great book, my friend, has done more work than all the helots that laboured on these pyramidal futilities.1910 January 12, Ameen Rihani, “Probing the Trivial”, in The Book of Khalid, New York, N.Y.: Dodd, Mead and Company, published October…. From the entry helot
  • Periodically they would convene impromptu two-minute hate sessions to compare notes on the arrogance and futility of philosophy and its claims on the territory of AI research.2012, Giuseppe Mantovani, Exploring Borders: Understanding Culture and Psychology, Routledge, →ISBN, page 113. From the entry two-minute hate
  • The futility of last-wordism at the Court is reflected in the apparent shyness of past perpetrators: They do not make second attempts to get the last word.2010, Ross E. Davies, “The Last Word”, in The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process, volume 229. From the entry last-wordism
  • Countless demolitions and re-edifications; a thorough unpurpose, so it seems, a thorough futility, that appears to be the truth and what could be more afflicting to an historian?1954, Austryn Wainhouse, Hedyphagetica. From the entry unpurpose

Meaning of futility

  1. noun The quality of being futile or useless.
  2. noun Something, especially an act, that is futile.
  3. noun Unimportance.

Full definition of futility

Questions about futility in a sentence

How do you use futility in a sentence?
Futility is used as a noun. For example: “His taking the bar exam for a third time was pure futility.”
What is a short sentence with futility?
“an exercise of futility”
What does futility mean?
Futility means the quality of being futile or useless.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: futility (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use futility in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/futility. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.