meaningless

Meaningless is an adjective used to describe something that lacks meaning, sense, purpose, or significance. It is applied to utterances, ideas, actions, or phenomena when they fail to convey intelligible content within a given framework of interpretation. The assessment of meaning often depends on context, including language, culture, and the intentions of participants.

In linguistics and philosophy of language, meaningfulness is tied to reference and sense. A sentence can be syntactically well-formed yet semantically meaningless if its terms do not compose into a proposition with truth-conditions. The sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is frequently cited as an example of grammatical but semantically nonsensical content. More broadly, statements may be considered meaningless if they have no referent or no determinate truth-value within a theory.

In formal logic and mathematics, discussions of meaninglessness appear in topics such as vacuous truth and reference gaps. Statements about non-existent objects can be vacuously true or lack content altogether, prompting questions about what it means for a claim to be meaningful.

In philosophy and culture, meaninglessness is often examined as a condition of existence or as a target of critique. Existentialist thought emphasizes creating personal meaning in a world without inherent significance. In art and literature, the term is sometimes used deliberately to challenge conventional expectations about purpose or interpretation.