flightless
7
3.9
- adjective
- /ˈflaɪt.ləs/
:
sin alas
- Some species of penguins are flightless birds that thrive in cold environments.
- a flightless bird
Even more disturbing image when you remember that big bird is flightless now.
- Even more disturbing image when you remember that big bird is flightless now.
- What large flightless bird has eyeballs bigger than its brain?
- And do you know what has happened to most flightless birds?
Examples
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The ostrich is a flightless bird, one of 60 species.
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The ostrich is a flightless bird that can run faster than most humans.
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Is he by any chance a big, flightless bird?
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And do you know what has happened to most flightless birds?
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Please bear in mind I am, in fact, flightless!
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I watch him cross the road like a small flightless bird from a National Geographic special.
Fiction book (1991) -
The kakapo is a nearly extinct flightless parrot from New Zealand.
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There is the flightless cormorant of the Galápagos Islands and the pygmy cormorant of Eastern Europe.
Academic text (2009) -
The larger ones—the swan and pelican, the flightless goose and adzbill, the breeding seabirds—were surely hunted for food.
Academic text (1990) -
Still, radiocarbon dating of sites containing bones of the moa (an extinct, flightless bird) to the eleventh and twelfth centuries seemed to support the accepted chronology.
Academic text (2003)
Synonyms
An animal that cannot fly
Compounds
How Free
Surface Forms
Morphology
flightless = flight (transparent) = flight + less
Standard productive formation: 'flight' (ability/act of flying) + '-less' = 'without flight' i.e. unable to fly, which is directly inferable.
Etymology
Flightless comes from flight ('the act of flying') and the ending -less ('without'), just like in hopeless. So flightless means 'without flight' and describes birds or insects that cannot fly.