Without employment; not having a job or being unemployed.
From employ + -less (without or lacking). The suffix -less comes from Old English and creates adjectives describing absence or negation.
While we say 'unemployed' for people without jobs, 'employless' appears more in older texts and poetry—it emphasizes emptiness and loss, making it feel more poignant, like something vital is genuinely missing rather than just temporarily absent.
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