Adjective: idle
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more idle |
| Superlative | most idle |
Sample Sentences
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idle hours
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My computer hibernates after it has been idle for 30 minutes.
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The majority of accounts require no minimum balance and charge no monthly service fee. Where monthly fees and balance requirements exist, they're low. You earn no interest on the idle money in the account. [2009, Jane Bryant Quinn, Making the Most of Your Money Now:]
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idle workmen
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Molly the dairymaid came a little way from the rickyard, and said she would pluck the pigeon that very night after work. She was always ready to do anything for us boys; and we could never quite make out why they scolded her so for an idle hussy indoors. It seemed so unjust. Looking back, I recollect she had very beautiful brown eyes. [1879, R[ichard] J[efferies], chapter 1, in The Amateur Poacher, London: Smith, Elder, & Co., […], →OCLC:]
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an idle fellow
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“I don't mean all of your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, the worn-out, passionless men, the enervated matrons of the summer capital,[…]!” [1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, chapter VI, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC:]
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an idle story; idle talk; idle rumor; idle threats; idle pleasures
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The youth is idle [1628, John Ford, The Lover's Melancholy:]
Adjectives inflected like idle
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 idel, ydel, from Old English īdel, from Proto-West Germanic *īdl, from Proto-Germanic *īdlaz. Cognate with Dutch ijdel (“vain, meaningless”), ijl (“rareified, skinny”), iel (“thin, slender”); German Low German iedel (“vain, idle”); German eitel (“vain, conceited”); and possibly Old Norse illr ("bad"; > English ill). See: Dutch Adjectives '
ijdel', German Adjectives '
eitel', English Adjectives '
ill'.
Verbs referencing "idle"
German Adjectives
eitel, Dutch Adjectives
ijdel.