vacuitous

English

Etymology

Latin vacuus (“empty, vacant”)

Adjective

vacuitous (comparative more vacuitous, superlative most vacuitous)

1. (obsolete) Lacking thought or intelligence; vacuous.
   • 1851, James Yearsley, A Treatise on the enlarged tonsil and elongated uvula, etc, page 75:

     The half-opened mouth, and consequently the vacuitous expression of countenance, the thickness of breathing, which sometimes could be heard across the room, and the nasal speech, all plainly indicated the difficulty she laboured under.

   • 1876, William Harvey, On Deafness and Noises in the Ear Arising from Rheumatism:

     Persons thus troubled are obliged at all times to keep their lips apart, or their mouth open, to enable them to breathe, and in time the features acquire a contracted and vacuitous expression, even in the most intelligent.

   • 1888, Nelson Sizer, Choice of Pursuits, Or, What to Do and why, page 127:

     Thus boys, and even young men, get situations in offices to run of errands and stay about the place to answer any calls which may be made ; thus they become listless, vacuitous, lazy, and utterly demoralized, and they come to man's estate without a trade or profession, and become aimless sponges upon the prosperity of the community.

2. Lacking substance; trivial; meaningless.
   • 1864, London society - Volume 6, page 374:

     He took Miss Lynes to supper; he outshone himself in vacuitous small-talk during the whole time that the meal lasted ; he held undisputed possession of her during that hour especially dear to flirtation, between the time when supper ended and the departure of the guests.

   • 1888, Ohio State Medical Society, Transactions of the Annual Meeting, page 33:

     From his excellency, the President of this great Republic, down to the President of the Rural Debating Society, a patient and long-suffering people has been pelted, so to speak, by them with this too often vacuitous literature for lo, these many years.

   • 1963, Islamic Studies - Volume 2, page 196:

     But the experience of the divine which is unrelated to the world, to fellow-men, is a vacuitous escape, a personal enjoyment whose intensity or depth can never excuse its privacy, its exclusiveness, its rock-bottom selfishness.

3. Deficient; lacking.
   • 1972, Gunnar Myrdal, Seth S. King, Asian Drama; an Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations:

     The doing of an act which might not lawfully be done, is nugatory, ineffective and vacuitous.

   • 1994, Bob Flaws, Imperial Secrets of Health and Longevity, page 33:

     In addition, ectomorphic or very thin, nervous people may be constitutionally yin vacuitous from birth.

   • 2008, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Lords, The Parliamentary Debates (Hansard).:

     We hear the usual argument about lack of parliamentary time, so if there is no time for that, how can there be time for this second-rate Statement of vacuitous quality.

4. Empty.
   • 1907, Colorado Medicine - Volume 4, page 285:

     On the one hand there will be vacuitous chambers and on the other hand too much air.

   • 1920, John Martin Russell, Solar empyrean; or, Cosmos and the mysteries expounded, page 75:

     The Sun, the moon, the planets and the stars are, undoubtedly, moulded after the same pattern of immense cosmic shells with vacuitous interiors.

   • 1976, Canadian journal of zoology - Volume 54, Issues 1-6 -, page 723:

     Fibres from the first rib and the arch between it and the second rib arise from tough, vacuitous fascia and diverge to spread thinly along the medial border of the scapula.