Dinnerless

/ˈdɪnərləs/ adjective

Definition

Without dinner; lacking a meal or the experience of eating dinner.

Etymology

From dinner (main meal) + -less suffix meaning without. Standard English morphology creating an adjective meaning the absence of dinner.

Kelly Says

While seemingly straightforward, 'dinnerless' appears surprisingly often in Victorian and early 20th-century literature as a marker of poverty or hardship—going without dinner was a concrete symbol of deprivation that readers immediately understood.

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