gratuitous
adjective
Roger L'EstrangeCurrent Biography
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These Gratuitous Facts Are Free
Like gratitude, grace, and congratulate, gratuitous is a descendant of the Latin word gratus, which means "pleasing" or "grateful." When gratuitous was first used in the 17th century, it meant "free" or "given without return benefit or compensation." The extended meaning "done without good reason" or "unwarranted" came about just a few decades later, perhaps from the belief held by some people that one should not give something without getting something in return. Today, that extended meaning is the more common sense, employed, for example, when graphic cruelty depicted in a work of fiction is described as "gratuitous violence," or when unkind words better left unsaid are described as "a gratuitous insult."
Examples of gratuitous in a Sentence
Dennis Harvey, Variety, 2 May 2025
Pop Step is fantastic and has a great personality, but she's introduced with gratuitous shots of her rear, and her body is talked about far too much even in the first episode.
—John W. Dean, MSNBC Newsweek, 7 Apr. 2025
Unlike Grey’s, though, The Pitt doesn’t treat us to gratuitous shots of Dr. Robby answering doors shirtless or hooking up with interns.
—Emma Specter, Vogue, 3 Apr. 2025
Both of these aspects set the tone for the raw carnage that would be reproduced in Doom Eternal (2020), a solid sequel that doubled down on the gratuitous bloodletting and amped up the industrial sound of the Doom (2016) OST to a new level.
—Kazuma Hashimoto, Rolling Stone, 31 Mar. 2025
See All Example Sentences for gratuitous
Cite this Entry
“Gratuitous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gratuitous. Accessed 22 May. 2025.
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gratuitous
adjective
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