a. [f. as prec. + -LESS.]
1. Without good features; ugly. rare.
c. 1600. Shaks., Sonnet xi.
| Let those whom Nature hath not made for store, | |
| Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish. |
1860. The Saturday Review, IX., 30 June, 831/1. If the tyrant of a cultivated Greek city had surrounded himself with a guard of featureless barbarians from the northern extremity of the Euxine, the measureless loathing he would have excited among a people which half-worshipped its own beauty and grace might have been something like the nausea produced in the Romans by the Pope’s new defenders.
2. Wanting facial features. Also, Having no marked or prominent feature.
1825. Coleridge, Aids Refl. (1848), I. 224. The other [face of Janus] … maimed, featureless, and weather-bitten.
1835. Lytton, Rienzi, VI. ii. Featureless spectres … they seemed in their shroud-like robes and uncouth vizards.
1868. Ld. Houghton, Select, fr. Wks., The Northern Knight in Italy, 203.
| The eastern star, a crystal eye of gold, | |
| Full on statued form of Beauty shone, | |
| Now prostrate, powerless, featureless and cold, | |
| A simple trunk of deftly carven stone. |
1875. Jowett, Plato (ed. 2), III. 66, The Republic, Introduction. How indiscriminate lovers are in their attachments; they love all, and turn blemishes into beauties … the featureless are faultless.
3. transf. Without any prominent mark or point of interest; uninteresting.
1839. Murchison, Silur. Syst., I. ii. 22. The western boundary is ill defined, owing to the low and featureless form of the ground and its being covered by vast accumulations of gravel, sand, and peat-bog.
1871. The Saturday Review, XXXI. 29 April, 531/2. There is enough general diffusion of taste—or of what pretends to be taste—among persons in easy circumstances to have made the absolutely featureless country house of George III.’s reign an anachronism.
1879. Farrar, St. Paul (1883), 717. Not recognising a single landmark on the featureless shore, the only thought of the selfish heathen sailors was to abandon the hulk and crew to their fate, while they saved themselves in the boat which they had with such trouble and danger hoisted on board.
1891. Punch, Christmas, No. 7/2. Altogether the month will be so featureless, that it can scarcely be described as the March of Events.
b. Of business, esp. on the stock market: Giving no occasion for remark; uneventful.
1879. Standard, 21 May, 2/1. Business in Discount to-day was absolutely featureless.
1885. Manch. Exam., 1 April, 4/1. Canadian Pacific shares were featureless.
Hence Featurelessness.
1883. Isabella Lucy Bird, Sketches in the Malay Peninsula, ii., in The Leisure Hour, XXXII. 21/1. Yet with all this indefiniteness, dreaminess, featurelessness, indolence, and silence, of which I have attempted to convey an idea, Malacca is very fascinating, and no city in the world, except Canton, will leave so vivid an impression upon me, though it may be but of a fragrant tropic dream and nothing more.
