inutility

English

Etymology

in- +‎ utility, from Latin inutilitas.

Noun

inutility (usually uncountable, plural inutilities)

1. (uncountable) Uselessness.
2. (uncountable) Unprofitableness.
3. (countable) Something of no use.
   • 1841, A Slight Sketch of the Life of Whitlock Nicholl:

     But I will hope better things for young Robert's sake; that he will learn something more important than that most useless of all inutilities, the forging of hexameters and pentameters […]

   • 1899, Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co.:

     A hideous account of a hanging, drawing, and quartering had first attracted him to it; but later he discovered the book (Curiosities of Literature was its name) full of the finest confused feeding—such as forgeries and hoaxes, Italian literary societies, religious and scholastic controversies of old when men (even that most dreary John Milton, of Lycidas) slanged each other, not without dust and heat, in scandalous pamphlets; personal peculiarities of the great; and a hundred other fascinating inutilities.

Synonyms

• See also Thesaurus:inutility

Antonyms

• utility

Related terms

• disutility

Translations

uselessness — see uselessness

unprofitability — see unprofitability

References

• “inutility”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.