Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use inefficient in a sentence

29 example sentences · adjective, noun

Inefficient means not efficient; not producing the effect intended or desired; inefficacious. Example: “Celery is an inefficient food.”

Examples of inefficient by meaning

adjectiveNot efficient; not producing the effect intended or desired; inefficacious.

  • Celery is an inefficient food.

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

  • 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

nounA 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

More sentences with inefficient

  • The airports are slow now because the pre-boarding screening is so inefficient.From the entry screening
  • The bottleneck in this computer program is the inefficient sorting process; we should replace it with a faster one.From the entry bottleneck
  • Socialism is high-cost, uninnovative, and inefficient, whereas production by private firms tends to be innovative and efficient.2012, David R. Henderson, “Do Governments Need to Go to War for Oil?”, in Robert E. Looney, editor, Handbook of Oil Politics, Taylor &…. From the entry uninnovative
  • Though machine language is efficient for computers, it is inefficient for programmers.1986, Lawrence S. Orilia, Computers and Information. From the entry machine language
  • So you see, imagination needs ”moodling”— long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.1938, Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit. From the entry moodling
  • To turn light into food takes several steps, but the key is an extremely inefficient enzyme called RuBisCO.2022, Thomas Halliday, Otherworlds, Penguin, published 2023, page 29. From the entry rubisco
  • Unfortunately, he turned the corner in a rather inefficient manner, cutting off his retreat and bumped into a rothe.1993, Robert Leduc, “Nethack Imitates Life”, in rec.games.hack (Usenet). From the entry rothe
  • The list representation is a pointerless representation that facilitates sequential access but is inefficient for random access to specific image elements.1992, Giorgio Gambosi, Michel O Scholl, Hans-Werner Six, Geographic database management systems: workshop proceedings, Capri, Italy. From the entry pointerless
  • Unfortunately, listful style can be very inefficient.1986, Dissertation Abstracts International: The sciences and engineering. From the entry listful
  • You looked at the yield curve arching and slumping like an inchworm making its inefficient progress, and it told you everything you needed to know.2020, Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind, Bloomsbury (2023), page 66. From the entry yield curve
  • Thus, from the 70s on, all the wondrous legal forms of 'self-management negotiations' (dogovaranja) proved inefficient within toothless 'indicative planning' and a profit-bent capitalist market.2016, Darko Suvin, “In Production: Rise and Fall of Self-management”, in Splendour, Misery, and Possibilities: An X-ray of Socialist…. From the entry logorrhea
  • Legion: Your new platform is inefficient.2012, BioWare, Mass Effect 3 (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →OCLC, PC, scene: Normandy SR-2. From the entry top-heavy
  • Throughout American history, the populist antifinance bias has led to many political decisions that were inefficient from an economic point of view.2012, Luigi Zingales, A Capitalism for the People, page 10. From the entry antifinance
  • To obtain pure HMF, chemists have had to redissolve it in a solvent that is hard to boil away, making the process costly and inefficient.2006, J. R. Minkel, “Pre-Plastic Fantastic”, in Scientific American, 259(3):36. From the entry HMF
  • Yukti - dipikā and Jayamangalā, theory of evolution is the notion of multiplicSāṁkhya - pravachana - sūtra (an aphoristicity of inefficient but necessary purushas.1999, S. R. Sudarshan, Encyclopaedia of Indian Medicine, Popular Prakashan, →ISBN, page 181. From the entry aphoristicity
  • It is estimated that 'galamseyers' lose up to 70 per cent of their potential take, because of the inefficient methods they use.1992, Africa Review, page 96. From the entry galamseyer
  • This is a very inefficient process so far as the broilerman's pocketbook is concerned, and it just doesn't make good poultry sense.1959, Poultry Digest, volume 18, page 262. From the entry broilerman
  • Davina told me earlier that Luke was the stroppiest patient she'd ever had and that he'd given her a lecture on how inefficient and time-wasting her medical was.2010, Sophie Kinsella [pseudonym; Madeleine Wickham], Mini Shopaholic, page 341. From the entry stroppy
  • “As a result, I must conclude that Trooper II Rasinski’s precrash driving conduct was culpably inefficient and in violation of the division’s rules and regulations,” he continued.2007 June 22, David W. Chen, “Officials Find Lapses by Trooper Who Drove Corzine in Parkway Accident”, in New York Times. From the entry precrash
  • It's been said that some high-tech experts think so little of actual conversation that they call it “facemail,” in their minds an inefficient and inferior form of communication.2001, Andrew Finlayson, Questions that work. From the entry facemail
  • Unlike "noble" vigilantes, the police and court facilities which exist are said to be inefficient and corrupt, and juries are said to be easily "nobbled" or intimidated.2000, Italo Pardo, Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System, page 122. From the entry nobble
  • Independently of its ambitions in the R.O.K., the D.P.R.K. is beset by economic problems arising from overemphasis on heavy industry, deteriorating physical plant, and inefficient bureaucratic management.1970, Political Handbook and Atlas of the World, Council on Foreign Relations, page 190. From the entry D.P.R.K.
  • The author criticizes this method of damage calculation and provides examples of how it can "miscompensate" plaintiff for economic loss, leading to an inefficient deterrent effect and excessive social costs.1989, The Trade-mark Reporter - Volume 79, page 214. From the entry miscompensate
  • This does not mean, however, that entirely new characters evolved each time the environment changed and placed new adaptive demands on the human organism—this would be extremely imparsimonious and inefficient.1987, Kent Bailey, “The Paleopsychology of Pathological Processes”, in Human Paleopsychology: Applications To Aggression and Patholoqical…. From the entry imparsimonious

Meaning of inefficient

  1. adjective Not efficient; not producing the effect intended or desired; inefficacious.
  2. adjective Incapable of, or indisposed to, effective action; habitually slack or unproductive; effecting little or nothing.
  3. noun A person who cannot or does not work efficiently.

Full definition of inefficient

Questions about inefficient in a sentence

How do you use inefficient in a sentence?
Inefficient is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “Celery is an inefficient food.”
What is a short sentence with inefficient?
“an inefficient administrator”
What does inefficient mean?
Inefficient means not efficient; not producing the effect intended or desired; inefficacious.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: inefficient (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use inefficient in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/inefficient. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.