MERCILESS

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does merciless mean? 

• MERCILESS (adjective)
  The adjective MERCILESS has 1 sense:

1. having or showing no mercy

  Familiarity information: MERCILESS used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• MERCILESS (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Having or showing no mercy

Synonyms:

merciless; unmerciful

Context example:

gave him a merciless beating

Similar:

bowelless; cutthroat; fierce (ruthless in competition)

mortal (unrelenting and deadly)

pitiless; remorseless; ruthless; unpitying (without mercy or pity)

tigerish (resembling a tiger in fierceness and lack of mercy)

Also:

bloody (having or covered with or accompanied by blood)

inclement (used of persons or behavior; showing no clemency or mercy)

uncompassionate (lacking compassion or feeling for others)

hard (dispassionate)

unkind (lacking kindness)

implacable (incapable of being placated)

Antonym:

merciful (showing or giving mercy)

Derivation:

mercilessness (inhumaneness evidenced by an unwillingness to be kind or forgiving)

mercilessness (feelings of extreme heartlessness)

 Context examples 

The whip flashed out, here and there, on its merciless errands.

(The Call of the Wild, by Jack London)

It still regarded them with the merciless wistfulness of hunger.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

I saw his face grow hard and the merciless glitter come into his eyes.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

And beneath the brows, planted under his lids, was the merciless "$3.85."

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

I thought of Elizabeth, of my father, and of Clerval—all left behind, on whom the monster might satisfy his sanguinary and merciless passions.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Down came the long horse-whips, swayed by the most vigorous arms in England; but the wincing and shouting victims had no sooner scrambled back a few yards from the merciless cuts, before a fresh charge from the rear hurled them once more into the arms of the prize-fighters.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Faced by ferocious creatures which they had never before seen, they took refuge in the caves which our young friend has described, but they have no doubt had a bitter fight to hold their own against wild beasts, and especially against the ape-men who would regard them as intruders, and wage a merciless war upon them with a cunning which the larger beasts would lack.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

It disturbed the Doctor too, for when I went back to replace the candle I had taken from the table, he was patting her head, in his fatherly way, and saying he was a merciless drone to let her tempt him into reading on; and he would have her go to bed.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

I was spared the trouble of answering, for Bessie seemed in too great a hurry to listen to explanations; she hauled me to the washstand, inflicted a merciless, but happily brief scrub on my face and hands with soap, water, and a coarse towel; disciplined my head with a bristly brush, denuded me of my pinafore, and then hurrying me to the top of the stairs, bid me go down directly, as I was wanted in the breakfast-room.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He could get little air, and that little grew less and less under the merciless grip that ever tightened.

(White Fang, by Jack London)