SYNONYMS AND RELATED EXPRESSIONS
innocuous
adjective
Unlikely to cause harm or offense.
Local English device voice, when available. This is not a recorded dictionary pronunciation.
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Harmless or inoffensive
Closest synonyms
Related words and expressions
These extend or explain the idea and may require a different sentence structure.
Usage distinction
Return to topInnocuous concerns harm or offense. Innocent intent does not guarantee a harmless effect, so innocently intended is only related wording.
CHECK THE MEANING IN CONTEXT
See innocuous in use
The question seemed innocuous until the disagreement became apparent.
The club took steps to mitigate the disruption by clarifying the rules and offering a new question period. Refreshments might palliate the frustration during a long meeting, but they would not resolve the dispute. A proposed reminder about the deadline was innocuous on its own; the coordinator checked its wording anyway because members were now reading every announcement with unusual suspicion.
Compare an alternative with the original word in each passage. Shared meanings do not make every pair interchangeable.
Synonym reference scope and sources
The groups distinguish the senses selected for this study entry. Closest synonyms and broader related expressions have separate labels. The listed sources support lexical selection; not every phrase is a direct quotation from a source.
How the synonym reference was prepared / WordNet 3.0 license