inefficient
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See also: inefficiënt
English
Etymology
Pronunciation
Adjective
inefficient (comparative more inefficient, superlative most inefficient)
- Not efficient; not producing the effect intended or desired; inefficacious
- Celery is an inefficient food.
- Incapable of, or indisposed to, effective action; habitually slack or unproductive; effecting little or nothing
- 1987 January 17, Ronald Reagan, Presidential Radio Address:
- 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.
- inefficient workers
- an inefficient administrator
- Jessica was terribly inefficient at cleaning, so her brother usually had to clean the whole room.
Antonyms
Translations
not efficient; not producing the effect intended or desired
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incapable of, or indisposed to, effective action
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Translations to be checked
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Noun
inefficient (plural inefficients)
- A person who cannot or does not work efficiently.
- 1889, New York (State). Dept. of Labor. Bureau of Statistics, Annual Report (part 2, page 127)
- Two men were put to work who could not set their looms; a third man was taken on who helped the inefficients to set the looms. The other weavers thought this was a breach of their union rules and 18 of them struck
- 1903, Jack London, The People of the Abyss, Chapter 17:
- A general shaking up of the workers from top to bottom would result; and when equilibrium had been restored, the number of the inefficients at the bottom of the Abyss would have been increased by hundreds of thousands.
- 1889, New York (State). Dept. of Labor. Bureau of Statistics, Annual Report (part 2, page 127)