artless
/ˈɑːtləs
/adjective
1Without guile or deception: an artless, naive girl artless sincerity...
- My dictionary defines naivety as ‘The state or quality of being inexperienced or unsophisticated, especially in being artless, credulous, or uncritical.’
- Regarding the speaker's motive, it implies an artless lack of calculation or an active desire to tell unpleasant truths.
- When meeting the faculty at Wellesley, Roberts is artless enough to admit she has never been to Europe.
1.1Without effort or pretentiousness; natural and simple: an artless literary masterpiece...
- There's something awful about even a minor car accident, the way the order of the road, which we assume until the moment of impact is natural and artless, suddenly vanishes; the yelling; the horrible noises.
- The basic designs of the bags are simple and seemingly artless - a clutch is a rectangle and a pink velvet holdall the simplest container with the handles made of knotted lengths of fabric.
- As the main quality which Ellen Terry brought to these roles, in addition to her beauty, grace, and charm, was a seemingly artless naturalness and spontaneity, her success tended to be in ratio to the congruence between her and the part.
Synonyms
natural, naive, simple, innocent, childlike, pure, ingenuous, guileless, candid, open, honest, sincere, frank, straightforward, unaffected, unpretentious, modest, unassuming;
North American on the up and up
1.2Without skill or finesse: her awkward, artless prose...
- Reading their artless, jargon-infested prose, I was seized by a sudden urge to inflict violence on them in a concrete underpass or back alley.
- There's a winning earnestness to her book - she clearly loves her husband and child and the town she's chosen to live in - but her prose is clunky and artless.
- Socialist poetry: two words to conjure images of earnest but artless efforts by would-be Woody Guthries.
Derivatives
artlessly
/ adverb ...- ‘I'm in love with your brother,’ Karin's narrator states artlessly, before asking: ‘Is he willing?’
- You can see how Bettany would charm Crowe, film directors and Oscar-winning actresses because the actor is exuberant company, studiously modest and still artlessly open.
- It's artlessly written and hideously proofed.