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A British informal word for someone who looks, or acts, very stupid — not clever-cruel, more empty-headed, as if nobody is home behind the eyes. 'Don't just stand there looking gormless.' It is a bit old-fashioned and comic; a parent or a teacher might say it with a sigh, not as a vicious insult. It comes from a dialect word gaum, meaning heed or attention, plus -less (without): so without attention, without sense. The r in this spelling is not really an extra sound in most British speech; it is an old spelling trick, common in accents that do not pronounce r after a vowel, to show that the vowel is long. American English almost never uses the word.
呆頭呆腦的、愣住的(英式口語)
組成From dialect gaum ('heed, attention') + -less ('without'), from Old Norse gaum. The r in the spelling is a vowel-lengthening device in non-rhotic English, not an extra sound.
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
gormlessadj/ˈɡɔːmləs/
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Lacking intelligence, sense or understanding; foolish.
- Did I ever look so stupid: so gormless as Joseph calls it?
- But Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood were both so gormless and so wrapped up in their own silly little lives that they failed to notice anything unusual about their daughter.
資料來源:英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary(CC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。