inefficient
/ˌɪn.ɪˈfɪʃ.ənt/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.46 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
4
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Incapable of, or indisposed to, effective action; habitually slack or unproductive; effecting little or nothing.
noun
A person who cannot or does not work efficiently.
Example Sentences
- "Celery is an inefficient food."
- "inefficient workers"
- "an inefficient administrator"
- "Jessica was terribly inefficient at cleaning, so her brother usually had to clean the whole room."
- "The Defense Department, for example, has greatly expanded competitive bidding and is this year submitting to Congress the first-ever 2-year defense budget to replace the old, inefficient, year-by-year process."
- "[Gorbachev] did not champion perestroika and glasnost alone; much of the nomenklatura had decided that the Soviet economic and social model was dysfunctional, corrupt and endemically inefficient and had to change."
Etymology
Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Italic *n̥- Latin in-bor. Middle English in- English in- English efficient English inefficient From in- + efficient.