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starless. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
starless, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
starless in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
starless you have here. The definition of the word
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English
Etymology
From Middle English sterreles, equivalent to star + -less.
Adjective
starless (not comparable)
- Without visible stars.
- Synonym: unstarry
1667, John Milton, “Book III”, in Paradise Lost. , London: [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker ; nd by Robert Boulter ; nd Matthias Walker, , →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: , London: Basil Montagu Pickering , 1873, →OCLC, lines 422-6:A globe far off / It seemed, now seems a boundless continent / Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night / Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms / Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky;
1895 May 7, H G Wells, chapter 11, in The Time Machine: An Invention, New York, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company, →OCLC:The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless.
1931, Sinclair Lewis, “Ring Around a Rosy”, in I'm a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories, Dell, published 1962, page 160:A searchlight wounded the starless dark.
- 1940, Robert Hayden, "Sonnet to E.," lines 1-2, in Heart-Shape in the Dust, cited in "Robert Hayden: The Apprenticeship: Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940)", African-American Poets, Volume 1: 1700s—1940s, edited by Harold Bloom, Infobase, 2009, p. 15,
- Beloved, there have been starless times when I / Have longed to join the alien hosts of death,
1962, James Baldwin, Another Country, Dell, published 1985, Book One, Chapter 1, p. 10:A hotel's enormous neon name challenged the starless sky.
1992, Toni Morrison, Jazz, New York: Vintage, published 2004, page 35:[…] there is nothing to beat what the City can make of a nightsky. It can empty itself of surface, and more like the ocean than the ocean itself, go deep, starless.
- The starless night was very dark.
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