Skip to content
ontologydriven
Sign out

Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

starless en · ADJ

Pronunciation

Etymology

From Middle English sterreles, equivalent to star + -less. Piecewise doublet of asterless.

Meanings

  1. (not-comparable) Without visible stars.
    • A hotel's enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. 1962, James Baldwin, Another Country, Dell, published 1985, Book One, Chapter 1, p. 10:
    • […] 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. 1992, Toni Morrison, Jazz, New York: Vintage, published 2004, page 35:
    • The starless night was very dark.
    • 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; 1667, John Milton, “Book III”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, lines 422-6:
    • 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,
    • 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. 1895 May 29, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, chapter 11, in The Time Machine: An Invention, London: William Heinemann, →OCLC:
    • A searchlight wounded the starless dark. 1931, Sinclair Lewis, “Ring Around a Rosy”, in I'm a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories, Dell, published 1962, page 160:

Deriveds

starlessness · starlessly

Relateds

cloudless · unstarred · moonless · nonstarred · sunless

Synonyms

unstarry

Translations (14)

pl bezgwiezdny (without visible stars) · hu csillagtalan (without visible stars) · fa بیستاره (without visible stars) · kk жұлдызсыз (without visible stars) · bg беззвезден (without visible stars) · mk безѕвезден (without visible stars) · el άναστερος (without visible stars) · lt bežvaigždis (without visible stars) · tr yıldızsız (without visible stars) · hy անաստղ (without visible stars) · grc ἄναστρος (without visible stars) · fi tähdetön (without visible stars) · ru беззвёздный (without visible stars) · de sternenlos (without visible stars)