otiose means having no effect. It carries an Arena rating of 1430, earned across 6 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, otiose ranks #1,454 of 17,126 for Most Elegant Words, #1,902 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #4,324 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #5,727 of 17,151 for The Improbable.
otiose is pronounced /ˈəʊ.ʃi.əʊs/.
Why “otiose” is a great word
Otiose describes that which is at leisure and therefore idle, useless, or ineffective. It finds its origin in the Latin ōtiōsus ("idle, at leisure"), from ōtium ("ease, leisure"), first attested in English in the late 18th century. Unlike "futile," which mourns the failure to achieve a desired result, or "indolent," which casts blame on a person's habitual laziness, otiose drifts like dust on a sunlit afternoon, settling on actions, objects, or intentions rendered superfluous not by effort but by ease. It is the decorative spoon that stirs nothing, the unstruck piano in a house where no one plays, the hand that rests not from exhaustion but from the absence of anything worth grasping—the melancholy of potential held in permanent abeyance.
Etymology
From Latin ōtiōsus (“idle”), from ōtium (“ease”).
adj
- Having no effect.
- Done in a careless or perfunctory manner.
- Reluctant to work or to exert oneself.e.g.“Pemulis, w/ aid of 150mg. of time-release Tenuate Dospan, almost danced a little post-transaction jig on his way up the steps of the otiose Cambridge bus.” — 1996, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest […], Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 216:
- Of a person, possessing a bored indolence.
- Having no reason for being (raison d’être); having no point, reason, or purpose.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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