Inept

//ɪˈnept// adj

adj ·Common ·High school level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Not able to do something; not proficient; displaying incompetence.

    "As a waiter, he was inept, so they put him in the kitchen."

  2. 2
    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 failure may be."

Adjective
  1. 1
    revealing lack of perceptiveness or judgment or finesse wordnet
  2. 2
    generally incompetent and ineffectual wordnet
  3. 3
    not elegant or graceful in expression wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
maladroitapishartlessasinineawkwardawkward

Example

More examples

"They are a bunch of inept and aggressive cretins.."

Etymology

Borrowed from Middle French inepte, from Latin ineptus, from in- + aptus (whence English apt).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.