a. [f. as prec. + -LESS.] Without a tenant or tenants; untenanted, unoccupied, empty. lit. and fig.
1591. Shaks., Two Gent., V. iv. 8. Leaue not the Mansion so longe Tenant-lesse, Lest growing ruinous, the building fall.
1814. Cary, Dante, Inf., XX. 85. Plying her arts, remain’d, and lived, and left Her body tenantless.
1826. Disraeli, Viv. Grey, II. ix. Is it true that all the houses … are tenantless?
1871. R. Ellis, Catullus, lxiv. 181. Also a desert lies this region, a tenantless island.
1823. Clement Wood, When Earth Lifts Skyward, 5, in Amer. Poetry Mag., VI. Aug., 5.
| In the still night, when all the tenantless | |
| Soul knows the starry bow of opening space, | |
| And brims with bright invisible loveliness | |
| I see your face. |
b. Const. of: Untenanted by.
1613–6. W. Browne, Brit. Past., II. ii. 46. Or haue the Parcæ … Left some friends body tenantlesse of life?
1868. Rep. U.S. Commissioner Agric. (1869), 346. Streams heretofore tenantless of fish are now well stocked artificially.
