aimlessly

UK/ˈeɪmləsli/US/ˈeɪmləsli/

adverbC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,112 of 15,258leans spoken

Aimlessly means wandering along with no purpose in mind. Movement without a destination.

It attaches to verbs of movement and of activity, so wandering aimlessly, drifting aimlessly and scrolling aimlessly are all standard. The word usually carries a faint melancholy, since aimless activity suggests somebody who has lost their direction rather than somebody enjoying a stroll. The adjective aimless describes the wandering itself, and an aimless conversation is one going nowhere.

Definitions of aimlessly

1adverbaimlesslyWithout any purpose or direction.C1
“He wandered aimlessly round the town for an hour.”

Where it comes from

From aimless + -ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

aimlessly in the wild

Blud, one of the Slavic fairies in Slavic mythology, is an evil-deity that causes disorientation and leads a person aimlessly around and round.
Blud
The word is based on the verb to mope, which originally meant "to wander aimlessly"; it only later acquired the sense "to be bored and depressed".
Mopery
As they float aimlessly, they reflect on their pasts through flashbacks.
Limite
Mania errabunda or restless madness is the tendency of senile people (usually elderly) to wander aimlessly away from home.
Mania errabunda
By the end of the film, the bomber wanders aimlessly over the United States.
Wild in the Sky

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

aimless

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