motivelessadj.

1798 C. Lloyd Edmund Oliver I. 642 These..remain as materials for fresh combination, and initiate us into all the motiveless obliquities of human agency.

1816 S. T. Coleridge Let. 8 May (1959) IV. 639 The whole plan..seems to me to have been motiveless from the beginning.

1817 W. Godwin Mandeville II. 75 Had not that accident given us rather a motiveless contempt and abhorrence for others?

1879 M. E. Braddon Cloven Foot i Ah!..he wants something of me. This liberality is not motiveless.

1931 M. Allingham Police at Funeral xviii. 239 This cruel and, as far as we know, motiveless crime.

1987 Bella 14 Dec. 33/2 Their teenage son was killed with a nine-inch flick-knife in a motiveless attack.

1867 A. J. Davis Arabula xxxvii. 156 Just then having ‘nothing to do’ about the house or in the garden, I went motivelessly, listlessly, forth for a ramble—‘anywhere, anywhere’, on the solid earth.

1970 G. Greer Female Eunuch 37 When men began to grow their hair in our generation they were not acting motivelessly.

2000 Daily Mail (Nexis) 8 Apr. 32 Whoever motivelessly and brutally ended [her]..life has never been caught.

1850 Patriot 15 July 444/2 The very motivelessness of the attack, joined with the consentaneous evidence of a dozen witnesses,..would have justified a verdict of acquittal on the grounds of insanity.

1933 L. Strachey Characters & Comm. iv. ix. 315 This triumphant invention of the motivelessness of Iago has been dwelt upon by innumerable commentators.

1996 Guardian 19 Oct. (Weekend Suppl.) 42/3 There's a yawning sense of pointlessness and meaninglessness and motivelessness there.