Dictionary

speckless en · ADJ

Etymology

From speck + -less.

Meanings

1. spotless, perfectly clean
   • There was never a millionaire who had more speckless white suits than I had, though it's a matter almost of routine for officers to go dirty on anything but the swell liners. 1912, Gouverneur Morris, IT and Other Stories:
   • It shed a kind of good influence through the house, to see the little fellow in his fine linens flitting around, so careful was he to keep all things in speckless order. 1901, Hezekiah Butterworth, Little Sky-High:
   • Modest and tasteful poverty expressed itself in the speckless cleanliness and the modestly proportioned skirts of her light "print" gown, and in the scanty little mantilla of cheap black silk which she wore over it, edged with a simple frilling of the same material. 1866, Wilkie Collins, Armadale:
   • They did not walk in altogether speckless Sunday pumps, or much clear-starched into consciousness of the moral sublime; but in rugged practical boots, and by such roads as there were. 1865, Thomas Carlyle, History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.):
   • When the appointed time arrived and Majors Gladwyn and Rogers; Captains Dalzell, Grant, and Gray; Lieutenants Cuyler, Hay, and Brown, and half a dozen more, all in speckless uniforms, were assembled about the homely but well-laden mess-table, there entered still another at whom the newcomers gazed in surprise but without recognition. 1922, Kirk Munroe, J. Finnemore, At War with Pontiac:
2. spotless; without blemish
   • All the wood used was new and speckless, and smelt sweet and clean. 1919, George Herbert Fosdike Nichols (a.k.a. Quex), Pushed and the Return Push:
   • The noonday sunshine lay in a thin, silvery glister on the slopes of the mountain before them, and in the brilliant light the colossal forms of the Lion's Head were prismatically outlined against the speckless sky. 1896, William Dean Howells, The Landlord at Lion's Head, Volume 1:

Forms

Deriveds

specklessly · specklessness