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The condition or quality of being idle (in the various senses of that word); uselessness; fruitlessness; triviality; inactivity; laziness.

To give a satisfactory reason; to tell the cause of; to explain; - - with for; as, idleness accounts for poverty. To account of, to esteem; to prize; to value. Now used only in the passive. "I account of her beauty." Shak. Newer was preaching more accounted of than in the sixteenth century. Canon Robinson.…

Produced or occasioned by beggary. [Obs.] Beggarly sins, that is, those sins which idleness and beggary usually betray men to; such as lying, flattery, stealing, and dissimulation. Jer. Taylor.

An imaginary country of idleness and luxury.

To waste time in effeminate or voluptuous pleasures, or in idleness; to fool away time; to delay unnecessarily; to tarry; to trifle. We have trifled too long already; it is madness to dally any longer. Calamy. We have put off God, and dallied with his grace. Barrow.

Inactivity; habitual sloth; idleness. [Jocular] Carlyle. Miss Austen.

To love in idleness; to do nothing. "Race of droning kings." Dryden.

ossession. Gen xvii. 8. And heard thy everlasting yawn confess The pains and penalties of idleness. Pope.

ers actively moving as a fiddler does; to move the hands and fingers restlessy or in busy idleness; to trifle. Talking, and fiddling with their hats and feathers. Pepys.

Lit., strolling; sauntering; hence, aimless; idleness; as, intellectual flânerie.

se shames ye underwent. Shak. To fool away, to get rid of foolishly; to spend in trifles, idleness, folly, or without advantage.

To neglect by idleness; to delay or to waste by sloth. [Obs.] Spenser.

To lsoe by idleness or slotch. [Obs.] Chaucer.

concoct; as, to hatch mischief; to hatch heresy. Hooker. Fancies hatched In silken-folded idleness. Tennyson.

To spend in idleness; to waste; to consume; -- often followed by away; as, to idle away an hour a day.

Idleness. [Archaic] "In ydlesse." Spenser. And an idlesse all the day Beside a wandering stream. Mrs. Browning.

Want of action or activity; forbearance from labor; idleness; rest; inertness. Berkeley.

Idleness; habitual indisposition to action or exertion; want of energy; sluggishness. The gloomy inactivity of despair. Cook.

t of exertion of body or mind, proceeding from love of ease or aversion to toil; habitual idleness; indisposition to labor; laziness; sloth; inactivity. Life spent in indolence, and therefore sad. Cowper. As there is a great truth wrapped up in "diligence," what a lie, on the other hand, lurks at the root of our presen…

either bodily or mental; steady attention to business; assiduity; -- opposed to sloth and idleness; as, industry pays debts, while idleness or despair will increase them. We are more industrious than our forefathers, because in the present times the funds destined for the maintenance of industry are much greater in pro…