0 If an action or attempt to do something is fruitless, it is unsuccessful or produces nothing of value:
All diplomatic attempts at a peaceful solution to the crisis have been fruitless.
1 unsuccessful or not productive:
The writer frankly acknowledges that each presents a very different case and that looking for connections between these women as playwrights is a fruitless exercise.
But these numbers are so small that it is fruitless to calculate percentages or to try to identify trends.
Any renewal of the alliance would most likely have been a fruitless attempt to stop the haemorrhaging.
The search for a body of theory or perspective which we can import into prehistoric archaeology and thereby solve our problems is fruitless.
As a political philosophy, his special brand of positivism was fruitless, and open to obvious and grave objections.
This can lead to hours of fruitless practising where the body is fully occupied in the activity but the brain is not engaged at all.
On the other hand, it seems fruitless to look for semantic homogeneity among determiners of different classes.
This is by no means to say that discussions about research and interdisciplinarity are fruitless.