limbless

limbless

English

Etymology

limb +‎ -less

Adjective

limbless (not comparable)

1. Lacking limbs.

   It hurt the general to see the limbless veterans who had sacrificed their arms and legs to a senseless war.

   We cut down the limbless tree for firewood, it was dead anyways.

   • 1696, John Banks, Cyrus the Great; or, The Tragedy of Love, London: W. Feales, 1735, Act I, Scene 1,

     […] wert not thou to blame,

     To counsel me to give the Reins to Cyrus?

     Pleas’d me with Hopes, and fed my longing Ears

     With cunning Tales of this ambitious Boy,

     And when myself wou’d fain have led my Armies,

     Made me lie down in Sloth, yielding to him

     These Hands, these Feet, my Legions, and my Strength,

     And left me then a weak and limbless Body,

     Drench’d in Delights, and drown’d in studies Pleasures.

   • 1770, Samuel Foote, The Lame Lover, London: Paul Vaillant, Act III, p. 61,

     […] as to this beautiful tree, with which Mr. Serjeant has ornamented his spot—No, gentlemen, no such matter at all; I am instructed to say quite the reverse; a stunted tree, a blighted, blasted tree; a tree not only limbless, and leafless, but very near lifeless; that was the true state of the tree […]

   • 1896, H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau, Chapter 14,

     It was a limbless thing, with a horrible face, that writhed along the ground in a serpentine fashion.

   • 1930, G. K. Chesterton, “The Moderate Murderer,” Chapter 3, in Four Faultless Felons, London: Cassell,

     The squat, limbless growth of the prickly pear was not like the green growths of home, springing on light stalks to lovely flowers like butterflies captured out of air. It was more like the dead blind bubbling of some green, squalid slime: a world of plants that were as plain and flat as stones.