Innocuous

WORD OF THE DAY

 

INNOCUOUS \ ih-NAH-kyuh-was \ adjective

 

Definition

1a: producing no injury
1b: harmless

 

2a: not likely to give offense or to arouse strong feelings or hostility

2b: inoffensive, insipid

 

Examples

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

-Peter Conrad

 

Their gas-shells, in particular, seem to have been almost innocuous.

-"The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.)" by Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell

 

Did you know?

Innocuous has harmful roots—it comes to us from the Latin adjective innocuus, which was formed by combining the negative prefix in- with a form of the verb nocēre, meaning "to harm" or "to hurt."

In addition, nocēre is related to the truly "harmful" words noxious, nocent, and even nocuous. Innocent is from nocēre as well, but like innocuous it has the in- prefix negating the hurtful possibilities. Innocuous first appeared in print in 1631 with the clearly Latin-derived meaning "harmless or causing no injury" (as in "an innocuous gas"). The second sense is a metaphorical extension of the idea of injury used to indicate that someone or something does not cause hurt feelings, or even strong feelings ("an innocuous book" or "innocuous issues," for example).