FUTILITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does futility mean? 

• FUTILITY (noun)
  The noun FUTILITY has 1 sense:

1. uselessness as a consequence of having no practical result

  Familiarity information: FUTILITY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• FUTILITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Uselessness as a consequence of having no practical result

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Hypernyms ("futility" is a kind of...):

inutility; unusefulness; uselessness (the quality of having no practical use)

Derivation:

futile (producing no result or effect)

 Context examples 

Sometimes he thought that I felt deeply the degradation of being obliged to answer a charge of murder, and he endeavoured to prove to me the futility of pride.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the state from its own rotten futility.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

He had travelled a greater distance than the other dogs in the yielding of himself to the rule of the gods, and he had learned more thoroughly the futility of opposing their will.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

Mine is no futility of genius that can't sell gems to the magazines.

(Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London)

He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

He faltered as the whole vast field of literature and the history of literature stirred in his brain and pointed the futility of his attempting to convey to her the reasons for his faith.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

They were good and kindly people, he forced himself to acknowledge, and in the moment of acknowledgment he qualified—good and kindly like all the bourgeoisie, with all the psychological cramp and intellectual futility of their kind, they bored him when they talked with him, their little superficial minds were so filled with emptiness; while the boisterous high spirits and the excessive energy of the younger people shocked him.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)