resistlessadj.

1590 C. Marlowe Tamburlaine: 1st Pt. sig. E8 So..Must Tamburlaine by their resistlesse powers..Conclude a league of honor.

1603 J. Davies Microcosmos 110 From Piety and cleere-Eyde Providence Authoritie derives resistlesse force.

1656 H. Jeanes Treat. Fulnesse of Christ 112 in Mixture Scholasticall Divinity It can subdue the most raging, and resistlesse lusts.

1693 S. Harvey in J. Dryden tr. Juvenal Satires ix. 184 Try to Imprison the resistless Wind.

1749 S. Johnson Vanity Human Wishes 13 Resistless burns the Fever of Renown.

1799 Monthly Rev. 28 525 An attraction of cohesion..which is..severing, with resistless interstitial force, the comparatively loose and feeble organization of every contiguous state.

1813 S. Parr Let. in Wks. (1828) VIII. 496 So peerless, so resistless, and upon this occasion so guileless an advocate..as Mr. Burke.

1874 ‘G. Eliot’ College Breakfast Party in Macmillan's Mag. July 163 That resistless weight Obstinate, irremovable by thought.

a1918 R. S. Bourne Hist. Literary Radical (1956) 92 A young Modernist priest..gave me a sense of that vast, subterranean, resistless, democratizing and liberalizing movement in the Church.

1941 W. J. Cash Mind of South ii. i. 132 The Calvinized Jehovah,..the resistless orderer of all things from the sparrow's flight to the stately pacing of the stars.

1991 M. Dibdin Dirty Tricks (1992) 38 I wasn't vain enough to think that the way she had come on to me..was solely down to my resistless charms.

1591 E. Spenser Muiopotmos in Complaints sig. X2 He seized greedelie On the resistles pray.

a1593 C. Marlowe Jew of Malta (1633) iii. sig. G The wastfull sea, Whose billowes beating the resistlesse bankes, Shall ouerflow it with their refluence.

1612 W. Parkes Curtaine-drawer 36 Vpon whose breasts are charactred & insculpt the ensignes of weaknesse, & resistlesse impotency.

1645 J. Marsh Marsh his Mickle Monument 32 Ah silly Lambs, resistlesse in your harms, Wasted and spoyl'd, yet shew no discontent.

1747 Lady M. W. Montagu St. James's Coffee-house in Town Eclogues 75 Her night-cloaths tumbled with resistless grace, And her bright hair play'd careless round her face.

1818 J. Keats Endymion iii. 118 O misery of hell! resistless, tame, Am I to be burnt up?

1892 Cornhill Mag. May 559 She was quite resistless, quite gentle.

1907 E. von Arnim Fräulein Schmidt xiii. 58 Why should we poor helpless little children, all soft and resistless, be squeezed and jammed into the rusty iron bands of parental points of view?

1937 Lowell (Mass.) Sun 12 Jan. 4/1 None but a diabolical schemer could have pounded the very life out of a resistless victim of 10 tender years.

2006 C. Frazier Thirteen Moons ii. ii. 79 Walking into the pen of a fat and muddy pink pig..and burying an axe between its resistless ears.

1794 J. Ebers Vollständiges Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache II. 562/2 Resistlessness, die Unwiderstehlichkeit.

1818 G. Watterston Lett. from Washington iii. 51 The singularity and resistlessness of his eloquence.

1870 Echo 5 Dec. The self-confidence and resistlessness of the men in the road.

1990 Boundary2 17 105 Isabel offers Pierre the chance to introspect, the potential to examine the resistlessness of the narrative of history in America.