Sample Sentences for
superfluous
(editor-reviewed)

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    The entire manoeuvre proved superfluous; no one came except Lewicki, who looked in towards evening, both curious and anxious to find out how I was.  (source)
    superfluous = unnecessary (more than is needed)
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    She did everything that was needed — cooked, washed, mended, made the bed, swept the floor, dusted the mantelpiece — always very slowly and with a curious lack of superfluous motion,  (source)
    superfluous = more than is needed, desired, or required
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    We will be superfluous even to ourselves, we will grow older, a few will adapt themselves, some others will merely submit, and most will be bewildered;--the years will pass by and in the end we shall fall into ruin.  (source)
    superfluous = more than is needed
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  • •
    That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it.  (source)
    superfluous = more than was needed
  • •
    Most men ... are so occupied with the ... superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.  (source)
    superfluously = (extra) more than is needed
  • •
    Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness.†  (source)
    standard suffix: The suffix "-ness" converts an adjective to a noun that means the quality of. This is the same pattern you see in words like darkness, kindness, and coolness.
  • •
    And so it went, the inexorable elimination of the superfluous.  (source)
    superfluous = more than is needed
  • •
    who by character and constitution preferred and, for all his seeming insensitivity, immensely enjoyed the useful, immediate, palpable: ruefully smiling to himself at the neatness of phrase in a null and void affidavit, ruefully grinning at the firm, responsible solidity of the newly wired-up round of a chair (the veritable image of his soul: good wire, no loop without its function, a small detail in relation to the whole but necessary, however distasteful to people inclined toward elegance, and admirable in its small way: superfluously strung: final) so that, knowing he was not his father, he had been satisfied with what he was, had cleverly revelled in it: had not built huge barns as the C†  (source)
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    She knew Mrs. Peter Blewett only by sight as a small, shrewish-faced woman without an ounce of superfluous flesh on her bones.  (source)
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    Desdemona robbed of life or honour is nothing to a Mordred, robbed of himself—his soul stolen, overlaid, wizened, while the mother-character lives in triumph, superfluously and with stifling love endowed on him, seemingly innocent of ill-intention.†  (source)
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    No mouths, no sex organs— all these were superfluous.  (source)
    superfluous = unneeded
  • •
    Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois.†  (source)
  • •
    "...lovers to have ..." I relish that last phrase. Its awkwardness (the "to have" seems superfluous) gives it substance and heft.  (source)
    superfluous = more than is needed
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