VACUOUS
adjective | VAK-yuh-wus
What It Means
Vacuous is a formal word indicating a lack of thought, intelligence, or substance.
// Despite a lengthy advertising campaign pitching the film as a masterwork, critics ultimately assailed it as dull and filled with self-important characters spouting vacuous platitudes.
vacuous in Context
“Harper Lee was not slight, was not vacuous. To Kill a Mockingbird is an artefact of its time … but it had its place in moving the arc of history and still does.” — Erica Wagner, The Observer (London), 18 Oct. 2025
Did You Know?
As you might have guessed, vacuous shares the same root as vacuum. Both come from the Latin adjective vacuus, meaning “empty.” This root also gave us the noun vacuity (the oldest meaning of which is “an empty space”) as well as the verb evacuate (originally meaning “to empty of contents”). Its predecessor, the verb vacāre, is also an ancestor of the words vacation, vacancy, and even void. All of these words suggest an emptiness of space, or else a fleeing of people or things from one place to another. Vacuous appeared in English in the middle of the 17th century, at first literally describing something that was empty. Centuries later it acquired its figurative usage, describing one who is lacking any substance of the mind.
Merriam Webster Dictionary
