sisyphean
/ˌsɪsəˈfiːən/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.75 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
1
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Incessant or incessantly recurring, but futile.
adj
Alternative form of Sisyphean.
Example Sentences
- "Sisyphean task"
- "Sisyphean labors"
- "Four bucketsful of water—one for each cell—seven for the long passage, two for lavatory and w.c.'s, brasses to clean, paint to dust. It seemed a Sisyphean task, no sooner ended than a new one was exacted."
- "As the world's drug habit shows, governments are failing in their quest to monitor every London window-box and Andean hillside for banned plants. But even that Sisyphean task looks easy next to the fight against synthetic drugs. No sooner has a drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one."
- "Fact is, this appliance actually contains some heaters in addition to its coolers. That apparent self-defeating contradiction is not a Sisyphean exercise in futility devised as a cruel philosophical joke by nihilistic engineers. It's actually just one of several brilliant pieces of engineering that have made these ubiquitous boxes utterly transformative forces in our lives."
- "But whoever does the policing, whether a supervisor or an operator, faces a Sisyphean battle against a well-documented phenomenon: something called automation complacency. When you automate any part of a task, the human overseer starts to trust that the machine has it handled and stops paying attention."
Etymology
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: Σίσυφος