futility

From Latin fūtilitās (“worthlessness, futility”). Surface analysis futile +‎ -ity.

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• Rhymes: -ɪlɪti

futility (usually uncountable, plural futilities)

1. (uncountable) The quality of being futile or useless.

   His taking the bar exam for a third time was pure futility.

   an exercise of futility

2. (countable) Something, especially an act, that is futile.
   • 1803, Thomas Jefferson, Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson‎:

     But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him, his sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities, and what remains?

   • 1843 April, Thomas Carlyle, “chapter XIII, Democracy”, in Past and Present, American edition, Boston, Mass.: Charles C[offin] Little and James Brown, published 1843, OCLC 191225086, book III (The Modern Worker):

     No man oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, without reason shewn. […] No man, wiser, unwiser, can make thee come or go: but thy own futilities, bewilderments, thy false appetites for Money, Windsor Georges and such like?

   • 1919, F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise‎:

     But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly curtain falls plump! upon our bobbing heads.

   • 2009 September 5, Robert Clark, “Exhibition preview: Goya: Fantasies, Follies And Disasters, Manchester”, in Guardian‎:

     There are moments of profound existential angst, howls of despair at the absurd futilities of war and a sneering disgust at the soul-destroying wastage of human potential.

3. (uncountable) Unimportance.

• exercise in futility