Word.ws English Dictionary

shiftless

shiftless adjective: lazy, unmotivated.

Adjective

shiftless (comparative more shiftless, superlative most shiftless)

  1. Lazy, unmotivated.
    • To expand, without bothering about it—without shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other—to the full compass of what he would have called a "pleasant" experience, was Newman's most definite programme of life.1876 July, Henry James, Jr., chapter V, in The American, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, […], published 5 May 1877, →OCLC, page 87
    • Decades ago, before credit scores, loan officers could make decisions almost whimsically and your fate could hinge on whether you reminded them of someone, or they had slept poorly the night before, or they harbored stereotypes of "shiftless blacks" and "flighty women."2015, Philip E. Tetlock, Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
  2. Untrustworthy as a result of being incompetent at the job.
  3. Destitute of shifts or expedients; lacking proper means.

shiftless meaning in Bengali, Malayalam and Kannada

shiftless in Bengali

অলস, অকর্মণ্য, উদ্যমহীন

shiftless in Malayalam

idle, lazy, indolent
ഉന്തനങ്ങാത്ത, മടിപിടിച്ച, അലസമായ, പ്രയത്നിക്കാനിഷ്ടമില്ലാത്ത, മടിയനായ, പ്രവൃത്തിവിമുഖമായ

shiftless in Kannada

ಜವಾಬ್ದಾರಿಯಿಲ್ಲದ, ವ್ಯವಸ್ಥೆಗೊಳಿಸುವ ಶಕ್ತಿಯಿಲ್ಲದ, ನಿರ್ವಹಿಸುವ ಜಾಣ್ಮೆಯಿಲ್ಲದ

Forms of shiftless

comparativemore shiftless
superlativemost shiftless

Origin of shiftless

From shift + -less.

Words formed from shiftless

Questions about shiftless

What does shiftless mean?
Shiftless means lazy, unmotivated.
What is shiftless in Bengali?
Shiftless in Bengali is অলস, অকর্মণ্য, উদ্যমহীন. See Shiftless meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is shiftless?
Shiftless is an adjective.

Words near shiftless in the dictionary

  1. shifting the dial
  2. shifting the goalposts
  3. shiftingly
  4. shiftingness
  5. shiftings
  6. shiftless
  7. shiftlessly
  8. shiftlessness
  9. shiftlessnesses
  10. shiftlike
  11. shiftmate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shiftless (page history and authors); shiftless (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); shiftless (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); shiftless (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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-VGPaleontologist-shiftless.wav.

Cite this entry: “shiftless.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shiftless. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.