futility

futile | American Dictionary

futile
adjective[ not gradable ]
us/ˈfjut̬·əl, ˈfju·tɑɪl/
achieving no result; not effective or successful:
The plane detoured north in a futile attempt to avoid the bad weather.

futility

noun[ U ]us/fjuˈtɪl·ət̬·i/
A sense of futility and powerlessness infected her.

Examples of futile

futile
Like thresholds for significance tests, statistical thresholds for what should count as futile are not discovered.
Her research explores a range of topics, including justice in healthcare, healthcare for aging individuals and populations, and the use of medically futile treatment.
Many public health physicians realized how futile their efforts were.
The family was responsible for continuing futile treatment in 62% of cases, the physician in 37% of cases, and a court-appointed surrogate in one case.
Therefore, attempts to extract meaningful information from the spectrum may appear futile.
The hospital had just adopted a policy specifying that life-sustaining treatment for permanent unconsciousness was futile and, therefore, not indicated.
Other arguments for continuing "futile care" are religious faith or religious doctrine.
Other factors may lead clinicians to prematurely foreclose the prospect of recovery and view care for patients with a disorder of consciousness as being futile.
Therefore, to separate these capacities seems futile, not only in the case of perceptual completion, but in general.
Second, and more basically, calling treatment futile is never, by itself, a justification for refusing treatment.
The world constantly renews itself, and when you look at it that way, regret and nostalgia seem equally futile.
An intervention may yield results slightly worse than the futility threshold, but would not be rejected as futile.
A permanently unconscious individual cannot be a 'patient' in the required sense and so any life-extending interventions for such a body are medically futile.
It would be futile to develop a chickenor-egg argument over the use of the techniques, symbolism and themes in industrial and cyberpunk.
However, business and strategic planning was often "perceived to be a futile exercise" which "can often take a low priority alongside the clinical workload".
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.