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A toneless voice is flat. It gives away nothing — no anger, no sadness, no interest, no rise and fall at the end of sentences. Everything comes out on one level. Writers use the word a great deal, and almost always to tell you something is wrong: a person answers 'toneless' after bad news, or after they have been asked the same question fifty times, or because they are hiding what they feel. It is a colder word than 'flat' and a much colder word than 'quiet'. Note that toneless is not about volume. Someone can speak toneless and loud. It is about the shape of the voice, not its size. The word can stretch to other things — a toneless grey, a toneless room — meaning without colour or life, but that is rare and literary; nine times out of ten you will meet it attached to a voice or to the way something is said. The adverb 'tonelessly' is just as common: 'she said it tonelessly'.
（聲音）平板、毫無起伏、聽不出情緒的
組成tone（語調、聲音的高低起伏）+ -less（沒有）— without tone. The -less ending goes back to Old English -lēas, related to 'loose': cut free of something, so, lacking it.
原始詞典資料3 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。
tonelessadj
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Lacking tone or expression.
- And sure enough she had settled down at once, so that in less than two months it seemed to Stephen that Miss Puddleton must always have been at Morton, must always have been sitting at the large walnut table, must always have been saying in that dry, toneless voice with the Oxford accent: ‘You’ve forgotten something, Stephen,’ […]
- The Cumshewa totem poles were dark and colourless, the wood toneless from pouring rain.
- 2
Lacking vitality; listless; lifeless.
- 3
human-scienceslinguisticssciencesLacking tone or pitch, have the neutral tone.
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。