HELPLESS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Helpless

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/hˈɛlpləs/ Listen

adjective

Helpless adj.

Destitute of help or strength; unable to help or defend one's self; needing help; feeble; weak; as, a helpless infant. "How shall I then your helpless fame defend?"

Beyond help; irremediable. "Some helpless disagreement or dislike, either of mind or body."

Bringing no help; unaiding. (Obs.) "Yet since the gods have been Helpless foreseers of my plagues."

Unsupplied; destitute; with of. (R.) "Helpless of all that human wants require."

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Etymology of 'Helpless'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Helpless" Quotes from Famous Books

... street. In one place several people were sitting out before the door, and among them was a poor, sickly child, such as are found very often in the low valleys of Switzerland, of the kind called cretins. These children are entirely helpless, and they have no reason, or at least very little. The one which Rollo saw was a girl, and appeared to be about ten years old; but it did not seem to have strength enough to sit up in its chair. It was continually lolling and falling about on this side and that, and trying ...

— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott

... replied my father, "that does not sit under the authority of Virginia. The helpless, Lewis, in their youth and inexperience, are not wholly given ...

— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post

... ramifications, and a kind of social pedestal from which she might really shine afar. The conscience I have spoken of grew positively sick as it thought of having such a problem as that to consider, such an ordeal to traverse. In the presence of such a contingency the poor girl felt grim and helpless; she could only vaguely wonder whether she were called upon in the name of duty to lend a hand to the torture of ...

— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... come. The baby—Josiah's pet, the one bright thing in his life—had fallen into the copper and been boiled. Hannah's mother had been crushed in the mangle, and was now a helpless cripple, who had to be waited on ...

— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome

... are obedient to the divine love. Hence it is written (James 1:27): "Religion clean and undefiled before God and the Father, is this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation," which means, according to a gloss, to assist the helpless in their time ...

— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

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