Tohu

Grammar

Word: תהו
Representation: ToHU
Transliteration: To-hu
Adjective: "desolate", "worthless/vain", "unusable"
Strong Concordance: H8414

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Exposition

Tohu is one of those words for which there is no real root, and so one needs to see how it is used within the rest of Scripture in order to apply it.

It does appear 10 times without any prefixing within scripture, and in each case, it describes an object as being desolate, worthless (and in this way, something vain and without any apparent use), and unusable.

See also: 

1:Sam. 12:21, "...go after tohu, which cannot profit or deliver..."

Isaiah 24:10 - "The tohu city is broken..."

Isaiah 34:11 - "...stretch over it a line of tohu..."

Isaiah 44:9 - "Those who form idols, all of them are tohu..."

Isaiah 45:18 - "...he did not create [the land] to be tohu, but..."

Isaiah 45:19 - "...I did not say to the seed of Jacob 'seek me in tohu...'"

and so forth.

Tohu is an expression of something that might have been, or might be, but in its current state, is almost nothing.