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vacuous

UK/ˈvækju.əs/US/ˈvækju.əs/
adjectiveC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #11,925 of 15,258neutral

Vacuous means empty of thought or meaning. A vacuous smile, vacuous remarks, vacuous celebrity culture.

It is a harsher word than empty because it accuses: a vacuous statement is one that sounded like something and was not. In logic it has a technical use, where a vacuous truth holds only because nothing meets the condition.

Definitions of vacuous

  1. 1adjectivevacuousEmpty of thought or meaning.C2

    “The celebrity gave a vacuous interview full of smiles and empty phrases.”

vacuous is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin vacuus means empty, the root of vacuum and vacant.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *h₁weh₂-

  2. Latin

    vacuus — empty, vacant

  3. English, today

    vacuous

Latin vacuus (“empty, vacant”) ous.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

vacuous in the wild

  • "If you're a great swimmer, then I'm the Queen of England", using a transparent false conclusion to imply the statement is vacuous and thus the premise is false.

    Vacuous truth

  • In mathematics, an empty product, or nullary product or vacuous product, is the result of multiplying no factors.

    Empty product

  • The text editor accepts repeated refinement of a selected span of text as it becomes progressively less vacuous of authored semantics.

    WYSIWYM (interaction technique)

  • The essay considers how pleasure resorts are likely to develop in the future, consisting of artificial environments with vacuous pleasures.

    Pleasure Spots

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.

Related words

the vacuus family

vacuum

vacuous — used about once every 10,786 pages · #11,925 · point at the bar for the others