bloodless – English adjective declension

Adjective: bloodless

Comparison Forms

Synthetic

Perifrastic

Comparative	more bloodless
Superlative	most bloodless

Sample Sentences

My bloodleſſe bodie waxeth chill and colde,
And with my blood my life ſlides through my wound,
My ſoule begins to take her flight to hell,
And ſummones all my ſences to depart: […] [c. 1587–1588 (date written), [Christopher Marlowe], Tamburlaine the Great. […] The First Part […], 2nd edition, part 1, London: […] [R. Robinson for] Richard Iones, […], published 1592, →OCLC; reprinted as Tamburlaine the Great (A Scolar Press Facsimile), Menston, Yorkshire; London: Scolar Press, 1973, →ISBN, Act II, scene vii:]
Thou dost not slumber: see, thy two sons’ heads,
Thy warlike hand, thy mangled daughter here:
Thy other banish’d son, with this dear sight
Struck pale and bloodless; and thy brother, I,
Even like a stony image, cold and numb. [c. 1588–1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene i]:]
The face was white and thoroughly bloodless with some kind of foundation cream; it stank of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. [1956, James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, Penguin, published 2001, Part One, Chapter 2:]
a bloodless conquest; a bloodless coup d'état; a bloodless revolution; a bloodless victory
Now and then a gaudy peacock would run from his shelter in the lauhala trees, but no wild boars came out, so we returned from our raid bloodless and spoilless. [1892, Rev. Herbert Henry Gowen, The Paradise of the Pacific, page 129:]
Those Philharmonic subscribers who considered Guest Conductor Igor Stravinsky too bloodless and ascetic […] last week found his successor, Georges Enesco, more to their taste. [1937 February 8, “No. 1 Rumanian”, in Time:]
Many of them are leaving us — the words. Gone into hiding […] Now they lurk, uncaged, behind other words, behind trending, brittle, bloodless little wokeisms […] [2024, Bruce Wagner, The Met Gala & Tales of Saints and Seekers:]
There is plenty of commentary, even among users of other platforms, about how Threads is bloodless (and owned by Mark Zuckerberg), Mastodon is inscrutable, and Bluesky is humorless. [2025 May 23, Charlie Warzel, “What Are People Still Doing on X?”, in The Atlantic:]

Adjectives inflected like bloodless

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

From Middle English blodles, from Old English blōdlēas (“bloodless”). Cognate with Dutch bloedeloos (“bloodless”), German blutlos (“bloodless”), Danish blodløs (“bloodless”), Swedish blodlös (“bloodless”), Icelandic blóðlaus (“bloodless”). By surface analysis, blood + -less. See: Dutch Adjectives 'bloedeloos', Swedish Adjectives 'blodlös'.