inept
/ɪˈnɛpt/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
Australia/ɪˈnept/
inept adjective: not able to do something; not proficient; displaying incompetence.
Adjective
inept (comparative more inept, superlative most inept)
- Not able to do something; not proficient; displaying incompetence.
- As a waiter, he was inept, so they put him in the kitchen.
- Stewing over recent legal defeats, he [Donald Trump] spent Sunday night posting a series of rambling rants assailing the “completely inept and embarrassing” Supreme Court, the “Deranged” former special counsel, […] and “a Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge” who ruled against...2026 March 16, Peter Baker, “In Choosing ‘Epic Fury,’ Trump Names a War and Defines His Presidency”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC
- Unfit; unsuitable.
- The bungled phrase, the slipshod paragraph, the inept metaphor, the irrelevant excursion, the disproportionate development, the feeble conclusion, are indeed all failures of meaning, and the more poetically ambitious the verbal structure in which they occur, the deeper and more substantive the...1954, W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, University Press of Kentucky, page xiii
inept meaning in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali and Malayalam
inept in Hindi
- not able to do something
- कुकृय kukŕy
inept in Urdu
- اناڑی, بےہودہ, بےتکا, نااہل, ناکارہ, نالائق
inept in Bengali
- কোনো কাজে অদক্ষ, কৌশলহীন, অনুপযুক্ত
inept in Malayalam
- inexpert, incompetent, unskillful
- അയോഗ്യനായ, കഴിവുകെട്ട, അസമർത്ഥം, കഴിവില്ലാത്ത, അസ്വാധീന, വശമില്ലാത്ത
More languagesFewer languages
- inept in Kannada
- ಹೊಂದದ, ಅಸಮಂಜಸ, ಅನುಚಿತ, ಕೌಶಲ್ಯವಿಲ್ಲದ
Examples of inept in a sentence
- Louis slang for redneck) with an inept, habitual tendency to commit petty crimes.
- But Berg was just a fool, a buffoon, a nonentity, a nonstarter so inept he took naps under bear bair.
- In these pages, an astute Sherlock Holmesian character solves all kinds of mysteries with help from a somewhat inept Dr.
Antonyms of inept
Forms of inept
| comparative | more inept |
|---|---|
| superlative | most inept |
Origin of inept
Borrowed from Middle French inepte, from Latin ineptus, from in- + aptus (whence English apt).
Words formed from inept
Words that rhyme with inept
Questions about inept
- What does inept mean?
- Inept means not able to do something; not proficient; displaying incompetence.
- What is inept in Hindi?
- Inept in Hindi is कुकृय (kukŕy). See Inept meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is inept?
- Inept is an adjective.
- How do you pronounce inept?
- Inept is pronounced /ɪˈnɛpt/ (UK).
Words near inept in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: inept (page history and authors); inept (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); inept (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); inept (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); inept (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-inept.wav.
Cite this entry: “inept.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/inept. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.