Idle vs Null - What's the difference?
idle | null |
(lb) Empty, vacant.
Not turned to appropriate use; not occupied.
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Not engaged in any occupation or employment; unemployed; inactive; doing nothing.
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*:Molly the dairymaid came a little way from the rickyard, and said she would pluck the pigeon that very night after work. She was always ready to do anything for us boys; and we could never quite make out why they scolded her so for an idle hussy indoors. It seemed so unjust. Looking back, I recollect she had very beautiful brown eyes.
Averse to work, labor or employment; lazy; slothful.
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*:“I don't mean all of your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle , brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, the worn-out, passionless men, the enervated matrons of the summer capital,!”
Of no importance; useless; worthless; vain; trifling; thoughtless; silly.
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(lb) Light-headed; foolish.
:(Ford)
To spend in idleness; to waste; to consume.
To lose or spend time doing nothing, or without being employed in business.
* 1939 , Joan Evans, Chateaubriand (page 32)
Of an engine: to run at a slow speed, or out of gear; to tick over.
A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
Something that has no force or meaning.
(computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
(computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
One of the beads in nulled work.
(statistics) null hypothesis
Having no validity, "null and void"
insignificant
* 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
absent or non-existent
(mathematics) of the null set
(mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
(genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
As an adjective idle
is (lb) empty, vacant.As a verb idle
is to spend in idleness; to waste; to consume.As a noun null is
zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.idle
English
(wikipedia idle)Adjective
(en adjective)Derived terms
* idle hands are the devil's workshop * idle pulley * idle wheelSynonyms
* See alsoVerb
(idl)- to idle in an IRC channel
- He had already heard of the young man's projected journey — evidently the Comte de Combourg had written many letters while his son idled at St. Malo
References
* *Anagrams
* * *null
English
Noun
(en noun)- (Francis Bacon)
- Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
Adjective
(en adjective)- In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.