a. [f. FRICTION sb. + -LESS.] Free from or without friction.
1848. in Craig.
1875. Croll, Climate & T., viii. 135–6. But prevailing winds which can produce such immense surface flow as that of the great equatorial currents of the globe and the Gulf-stream, which follow definite directions, must communicate their motion to great depths, unless water be frictionless, a thing which it is not.
1887. Ewing, in Encycl. Brit., XXII. 597/2. The joints and bearings of all the levers are made frictionless by using flexible steel connecting plates instead of knife-edges.
fig. 1848. Lowell, Fable for Critics, Poet. Wks. 1890, III. 53.
| And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet, | |
| Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot. |
1884. Kendal Mercury, 19 Dec., 5/2. The … frictionless speed with which the Boundary Commission are proceeding.
Hence Frictionlessly adv., in a frictionless manner; without friction.
1879. Thomson & Tait, Nat. Phil., I. I. § 319. A system in which any number of fly wheels, that is to say, bodies which are kinetically symmetrical round an axis, are pivoted frictionlessly on any moveable part of the system.
