what is gormles?

id go with the without gorm, GORM sounds amazing doesnt it

Gorm (according to the Dictionary of Archaic Words) means to smear or daub.

However, I was once told by dyer who was using tradional methods in a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village, that the substance used to fix a vegetable dye (in this case, urine) was also known as "gorm". If the colour subsequently washed out of the material, then the dye mix was "gormless" - the most useful part was missing. And this, he said, was how the word came into use to mean someone "missing the active ingredient".

I like this explanation.

Gorm on it's own is in the Oxford English Dicitionary as meaning: "An undiscerning person, a fool". Although admittedly that doesn't quite explain gormless as being without gorm if gorm actually means the foolish person.

Gorm was originally a Nordic name.

To have gorm is to have wits or intellect BUT strangely to be gorm is to lack those same qualities.

So you have gorm is a compliment

BUT

You are gorm is an insult, indeed it means exactly the same as calling someone gormless.

I got something interesting while searching for Gorm in the net

Gorm the Old (Gorm den Gamle) was King of Denmark in the mid-900s.

Gorm is a graphical interface builder application. It is part of the developer tools of GNUstep. GNUstep is a cross-platform, object-oriented framework for desktop application development.

I thought gormless meant someone who didn't have much idea of what was going on (ie lacking intelligence or stupid) this is not the same as passivity

the following is a dictionary definition

.gormless

adjective UK INFORMAL

stupid and slow to understand:

He looks really gormless.

(from Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

To be without gorm,Or having one gorm missing.

Gormless is a colloquialism

Gormless/gxmlis/ a colloq.foolish,lacking sense.[obs.gaumless f.dial,gaum understanding] That is what my dictionary has. What dictionary have you got?

We always say "what an uncouth young man!" when we find a young lad is impolite, yet we never say a polite one is 'couth'. We hear of a shooting by a 'disgruntled employee', yet that implies happy, content, workers are, err, 'gruntled'. It's just a dead-end of the logic of the English language, I guess.