Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use unproductive in a sentence

16 example sentences · adjective

Unproductive means not productive; useless; fruitless. Example: “Juggling is an amusing pastime, but generally unproductive.”

Examples of unproductive by meaning

adjectiveNot productive; useless; fruitless.

  • Juggling is an amusing pastime, but generally unproductive.

More sentences with unproductive

  • Unproductive soil should be turned under to help the soil for next season.From the entry turn under
  • As a parts-to-picker system it avoids unproductive picker travel and, thus, high personnel costs.2017 October 16, Nils Boysen, Dirk Briskorn and Simon Emde, “Parts-to-picker based order processing in a rack-moving mobile robots…. From the entry parts-to-picker
  • Should it be the schwerpunkt of Labor's attack or will it be an unproductive dilution of forces?2006 June 12, Terry Sweetman, “Kim Finds a Sore Point”, in The Courier-Mail, Brisbane. From the entry schwerpunkt
  • They were unproductive, except in Langru (other spelling Ranru) area where two fossiliferous localities were discovered .2003, Revue de Paléobiologie, volume 22, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 482. From the entry Langru
  • I found ( SLS ) hollow , unproductive , unalive , and above all stagy: not cinematic.1983, John S. McCann, The Critical Reputation of Tennessee Williams, page 171. From the entry unalive
  • Nostalgia is unproductive at best, and harmful at worst.2017, Frank Cifaldi, quoted in Will Freeman, "Save And Continue", Develop, April 2017, page 14. From the entry gatekeepery
  • They do not understand that “zeal without knowledge is a runaway horse” and that's why they are unproductive.2016, Johnstone Kayandabila, Leadership's Big Idea: High-Potential Leaders in the Making, →ISBN. From the entry zeal without knowledge is a runaway horse
  • The ecomodernists talk of “unproductive, small-scale farming” and claim that “urbanisation and agricultural intensification go hand in hand.”2015 September 24, George Monbiot, “Meet the ecomodernists: ignorant of history and paradoxically old-fashioned”, in The Guardian. From the entry ecomodernists
  • I've listed sample habits to demonstrate how you might sub out an unproductive one with a productive one.2013, Karen Elizaga, Find Your Sweet Spot, page 87. From the entry sub out
  • They misutilise that amount, spend uneconomically on unproductive items.2007, A.A. Rane & A.C. Deorukhkar, Economics of Agriculture, page 15. From the entry misutilise
  • This measure stems from the observation that productive morphological rules are likely to produce occasionalisms, whereas unproductive rules are not likely to do so.2010, Martin Haspelmath, Andrea D. Sims, Understanding Morphology, second edition, page 130. From the entry occasionalism
  • An unproductive edit war results as editors change the page back and forth between two incompatible versions, without troubling to engage in discussions.2008, Phoebe Ayers, Charles Matthews, Ben Yates, How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It, No Starch Press, →ISBN, page 388. From the entry edit war
  • Grove: After many years of unproductive discussion, the reopening of the London-Bristol line station to serve the nearby town of Wantage is back on the agenda.2018, Rail, issue 857, July 18-July 31, Regional News. From the entry reopening
  • These differences meant that meetings of the Cabinet’s welfare committee have been unproductive, with a brooding Mr Field and a waffley and increasingly prickly Ms Harman.1998 August 3, Peter Riddell, “Prisoners of conscience”, in The Times, number 66,270, London, page 18, column 5. From the entry waffley
  • The normal situation is when the majority is productive, a proletariat in professions like agriculture and industry, and only a minority is bourgeois, in unproductive trades like banking and commerce.1955, Dov Ber Borochov, To the Question of Zion and Territory, pages 41-42. From the entry luftgeschaeft

Meaning of unproductive

  1. adjective Not productive; useless; fruitless.
  2. adjective No longer used to produce new words (see examples).

Full definition of unproductive

Questions about unproductive in a sentence

How do you use unproductive in a sentence?
Unproductive is used as an adjective. For example: “Juggling is an amusing pastime, but generally unproductive.”
What is a short sentence with unproductive?
“Juggling is an amusing pastime, but generally unproductive.”
What does unproductive mean?
Unproductive means not productive; useless; fruitless.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unproductive (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 unproductive in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/unproductive. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.