inefficient

What it means

1. Not efficient; not producing the effect intended or desired; inefficacious.

   Celery is an inefficient food.

2. Incapable of, or indisposed to, effective action; habitually slack or unproductive; effecting little or nothing.

   inefficient workers

   4 more examples

   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.

   1987 January 17, Ronald Reagan, Presidential Radio Address

   [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.

   2007 October 13, Will Hutton, “Will China's next leader be its Gorbachev?”, in The Observer, →ISSN, archived from the original on 09 Jan 2025

In a sentence

Celery is an inefficient food.

Where it comes from

1. Proto-Indo-European*né
2. Proto-Indo-European*n̥-
3. Proto-Italic*n̥-
4. Latinin-
5. Middle Englishin-
6. Englishin-
7. Englishefficient
8. Englishinefficient

From in- + efficient.