inefficient

comparative more inefficient · superlative most inefficient

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

plural inefficients

1. A person who cannot or does not work efficiently.

   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.

   1903, Jack London, The People of the Abyss, Chapter 17

   1 more example

   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 […]

   1889, New York (State). Dept. of Labor. Bureau of Statistics, Annual Report (part 2, page 127)