inept

ENEnglish
//ɪˈnɛpt//(Canada, UK)

Direct German Translations & Equivalents:

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Definitions & Usage

adjective
#1

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

Example: As a waiter, he was inept, so they put him in the kitchen.
Translations:[DE]unfähig
adjective
#2

Unfit; unsuitable.

Notable Literary & Historical Quotes

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.

2026 March 16, Peter Baker, “In Choosing ‘Epic Fury,’ Trump Names a War and Defines His Presidency”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC:

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.

1954, W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, University Press of Kentucky, page xiii:

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