roachless

English

Etymology

roach +‎ -less

Adjective

roachless (not comparable)

1. (nautical) Without a roach (part of a sail).
2. (US) Without cockroaches.
   • 1900 September 10, “Tell It in the Headline”, in American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record, volume XXXVII, number 5 (whole 457), New York, N.Y., Chicago, Ill., page 143, column 1:

     There is no end of the headings you can devise using “roach” in each, thus: The roach dies. Doom of roaches. Roaches no more. No roaches left. The end of roaches. Who has roaches. Roachless houses. Not one roach. Roaches will go. No roach escapes.

   • 1942 August 7, “Harris Roach Tablets Sure Death to Roaches”, in Tampa Morning Tribune, 49th year, number 219, Tampa, Fla., page nine:

     Since introducing HARRIS ROACH TABLETS many testimonials have been received by boosters who have tried the successful method of ridding your home of roaches. For a ROACHLESS HOUSE try “HARRIS ROACH TABLETS.”

   • 1946, James Cornelius Leary, William I. Fishbein, Lawrence Cecil Salter, DDT and the Insect Problem, New York, N.Y., London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., page 70:

     Hence most of us, learning for the first time of DDT as a new miracle insect killer, think rather of summer days free of flies and summer evenings without mosquitoes, roachless houses and flealess dogs, than of a world without malaria or typhus.

   • 1999, Richard Schweid, The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore, New York, N.Y., London: Four Walls Eight Windows, →ISBN, page 108:

     For me, in the roachless home of those Nashville suburbs, it was irrelevant that in the past twenty years cockroaches have been identified as a leading cause of asthma, but for a boy growing up in a housing project, they may be why he has the disease, and they are almost certainly a contributing factor to the onset of his attacks.