Adjective: harmless
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more harmless |
| Superlative | most harmless |
Sample Sentences
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Near-synonyms: benign, innocuous, innocent, undamaging, nonthreatening, unthreatening
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This snake looks nearly the same as its poisonous cousin but is harmless.
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His humor can be annoying but is harmless.
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The most rapid and most seductive transition in all human nature is that which attends the palliation of a ravenous appetite.[…]Can those harmless but refined fellow-diners be the selfish cads whose gluttony and personal appearance so raised your contemptuous wrath on your arrival? [1921, Ben Travers, chapter 5, in A Cuckoo in the Nest, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, published 1925, →OCLC:]
Adjectives inflected like harmless
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
1. From Middle English harmles, from Old English *hearmlēas, from Proto-Germanic *harmalausaz (“without harm; harmless”), equivalent to harm + -less.
2. Cognate with German harmlos (“harmless”), Danish harmløs (“harlmess”), Swedish harmlös (“harmless”). See: German Adjectives '
harmlos', Swedish Adjectives '
harmlös'.