indolent - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Adjective
indolent (comparative more indolent, superlative most indolent)
- Habitually lazy, procrastinating, or resistant to physical labor.
- ✤ The indolent girl resisted doing her homework.
- ✤ Mr. Churchill has pride; but his pride is nothing to his wife’s: his is a quiet, indolent, gentlemanlike sort of pride that would harm nobody, and only make himself a little helpless and tiresome; but her pride is arrogance and insolence!1
- ✤ […] the obscurities of his text are not due so much to inherent philosophical difficulties as to Lenin’s indolent and superficial approach and his contempt for all problems that could not be put to direct use in the struggle for power.2
- Inducing laziness.
- ✤ * indolent comfort*
- (medicine) Causing little or no physical pain; progressing slowly; inactive (of an ulcer, etc.).
- (medicine) Healing slowly.
Etymology
From French indolent or directly from Late Latin indolēns, from in- (“not”) + dolēns (“hurting”), from doleo (“to hurt”).34 The later sense of “living easily, slothful” perhaps developed in French.4
Pronunciation
- (UK, US) IPA: /ˈɪn.də.lənt/
- Audio (US): 🔊
Printed 2026-09-04.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Footnotes
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1815, Jane Austen, Emma, volume II, chapter 18: ↩
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1978 [1976], Leszek Kołakowski, translated by P[aul] S[teven] Falla, Main Currents of Marxism, volume II: The Golden Age, Oxford: Clarendon Press, translation of Główne nurty marksizmu: rozwój (in Polish), →ISBN, →OCLC, page 466: ↩
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“indolent, adj. and n.”, in OED Online , Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000. ↩
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Douglas Harper (2001–2026), “indolent (adj.)”, in Online Etymology Dictionary. ↩ ↩2