motiveless

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

We now understand, more clearly than in the 1950s, that the consequences of human action on a global scale are rather like Godzilla: huge, unknowable, motiveless and not easily stopped.

From Scientific American • Nov. 3, 2023

Mr Blunt said: "This appears to be a completely motiveless, random, senseless, inexplicable incident."

From BBC • May 16, 2022

Some resistance was more overtly political; the critic Elaine Showalter, on Twitter, decried a plotline of the “saintly academic hero tormented by motiveless malignity of his despicable wife and other monsters.”

From The New Yorker • Mar. 11, 2019

Explanations for deliberate acts of criminality are sometimes not available; although these occasions are comparatively rare, there are motiveless crimes with no suggestion of any diagnosed disease of the mind.

From The Guardian • Oct. 2, 2018

In the nature of the case, as will appear, no story accounting for such wild events could be easily credible, so extraordinary, motiveless, and inexplicable do the circumstances appear. 

From James VI and the Gowrie Mystery by Lang, Andrew