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inept

adjective

No English definition recorded for this entry.

L23616 on Wikidata ↗

Wiktionary

Pronunciation: /ɪˈnɛpt/ / /ɪˈnept/

adj

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

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

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

    Stewing over recent legal defeats, he [Donald Trump] spent Sunday night posting a series of rambling rants assailing the “completely inept and embarrassing” Supreme Court, the “Deranged” former special counsel, […] and “a Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge” who ruled against him.

  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.