English edit

Pronunciation edit

Etymology 1 edit

From Middle English lackles, lakles, lacles, equivalent to lack +‎ -less.

Adjective edit

lackless (not comparable)

  1. (rare) Devoid of lack.
    • 1905, The Literary Digest, volume 31, page 530:
      Realizing as they do the necessity for reaching a class that they regard as beneath their own, they attempt to ' write down ' to their readers, and they are apt to do this with an insolence and a lackless condescension that are a positive insult to those whom they address.
    • 2012, Alessia Ricciardi, After La Dolce Vita: A Cultural Prehistory of Berlusconi's Italy:
      Fellini argues in Ginger and Fred that the rise of Italian commercial TV promotes an unself-conscious culture of narcissism, a space that is all image and no interiority and that corresponds to a mode of desire at once subjectless and lackless. The cinema, even in the form of Hollywood productions such as, say, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, encourages a positive desire that originates in loss and lack; television, according to Fellini's view, represents a realm saturated by advertising and the ambient noise of mass culture, a lackless universe in which the subject does not desire so much as renounce any principle ofidentity per se in a crescendo of nihilism.
    • 2016, James Nussbaumer, Mastering Your Own Spiritual Freedom:
      In order to continue to not be lacking, you must receive the joy as well, which others have available in their “lackless” supply of joy. This is how giving and receiving can be seen as two distinct aspects of the same thought.
Synonyms edit
Translations edit

Etymology 2 edit

Probably a special development of the above, influenced by luckless.

Adjective edit

lackless (comparative more lackless, superlative most lackless)

  1. hapless; unfortunate
    • 1913, Albert J. Roof, Past and Present of Livingston County, Missouri:
      Courts martial convened at the courthouse quite frequently for the trial of offenders against the militia law, and many a lackless delinquent was fined for his non-attendance at drills or musters, or for other offenses.
    • 1915, The Reformatory Press, volume 17, page 51:
      John Doe with gifts was richly blessed; he might have distanced all the rest, had fortune kindly been; but fortune put the kibosh on the efforts of the lackless John, and never won a grin. I wonder why an Edgar Poe found life a wilderness of woe, and starved in garrets bare, while bards who cannot sing for prunes eat costly grub from golden spoons, and purple raiment wear.