scattershot
scattershot adjective: covering a broad range in a random and unsystematic way.
Adjective
scattershot (comparative more scattershot, superlative most scattershot)
- Covering a broad range in a random and unsystematic way.
- They were appalled by his idea of making a spy service out of a scattershot collection of Wall Street brokers, Ivy League eggheads, soldiers of fortune, ad men, news men, stunt men, second-story men, and con men.2007, Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, Penguin, published 2008, page 4
- The result, disappointingly, is a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational; dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details.2013 September 10, Michiko Kakutani, “A Calamity Tailor-Made for Internet Conspiracy Theories”, in The New York Times
- Synonyms:
- scattergun
Synonyms of scattershot
Forms of scattershot
| comparative | more scattershot |
|---|---|
| superlative | most scattershot |
Origin of scattershot
From scatter + shot.
Questions about scattershot
- What does scattershot mean?
- Scattershot means covering a broad range in a random and unsystematic way.
- What part of speech is scattershot?
- Scattershot is an adjective.
Words near scattershot in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: scattershot (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: en-us-scattershot.ogg.
Cite this entry: “scattershot.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scattershot. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.