harmless
part of speech
adjective (harmless); adverb harmlessly
meaning for a pupil
1) Harmless means not able to hurt or damage anyone or anything. tree →
2) Harmless can mean not meant to upset anyone: harmless fun. tree →
sense in the lessons
In nature lessons many creatures look scary but are harmless, like most spiders in the UK, grass snakes and slow-worms; others look harmless but are dangerous, so you don't touch wild animals or plants you don't know. In lessons about tricks and teasing, a joke is harmless only if nobody is hurt or upset. In science, «harmless» bacteria do not cause illness. Phrases: harmless fun, completely harmless, perfectly harmless.
examples
- That spider is harmless; it won't hurt you. tree →
- It was just harmless fun, and everyone laughed. tree →
- Most bacteria are harmless. tree →
- A grass snake is harmless to people. tree →
- Some berries look harmless but are poisonous. tree →
- The dog looks fierce but it's really harmless. tree →
- A joke isn't harmless if it makes someone cry. tree →
- The firework fell harmlessly into the water. tree →
- There she is as harmless as a lamb. tree →
note
Built from «harm» + «-less» (without harm). Opposite: harmful, dangerous. Trap: something looking harmless does not prove it is safe; ask an adult before touching unknown animals, plants, mushrooms or liquids.
In the corpora
- Grown-ups love swapping it over the fence, and a lot of it is harmless fun.
- Exaggeration that everyone knows is a joke, like lights «seen from space», is harmless fun.
- When researchers sprayed a harmless mist into single canopy trees, beetles of hundreds of kinds fell out, many never named.
- Tiny harmless mites live in the roots of the eyelashes of most adults.
- The sudden jerk as you fall asleep is a common, harmless muscle twitch, and nobody is sure why it happens.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «harmless» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.