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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
feckless
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a feckless young man
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Doubtless, some are feckless individuals who could do better but simply don't trouble.
▪ Market forces remain free because of public imagery about the feckless, the idle and the deviant.
▪ Partly, no doubt, the figures include at least some wilful or at least entirely feckless credit misusers.
▪ The norms of domestic life it set forth drew a clear ideological boundary between rational members of society and the feckless.
▪ The spending may have been great but it was not being devoted to thousands upon thousands of undeserving and feckless claimants.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Feckless

Feckless \Feck"less\, a. [Perh. a corruption of effectless.] Spiritless; weak; worthless. [Scot]

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
feckless

1590s, from feck, "effect, value, vigor" (late 15c.), Scottish shortened form of effect (n.), + -less. Popularized by Carlyle, who left its opposite, feckful, in dialectal obscurity. Related: Fecklessly; fecklessness.

Wiktionary
feckless

a. 1 lacking purpose. 2 Without skill, ineffective, incompetent. 3 (context UK English) Lacking the courage to act in any meaningful way. 4 (context British archaic English) Lacking vitality.

WordNet
feckless
  1. adj. not fit to assume responsibility

  2. generally incompetent and ineffectual; "feckless attempts to repair the plumbing"; "inept handling of the account" [syn: inept]

Usage examples of "feckless".

She had thought the woman strident and hysterical and thoughtless for persisting in her plans for the next day in face of her own faint, barely acquiescent smiles, and a poor, feckless, fashionless housewife for thrusting those unwanted saucepans on the cook.

Cradossk was a wilier old reptile, though-Boba Fett even had a grudging respect for the head of the Bounty Hunters Guild, from some long-ago encounters with him-and would know just what the score was with his feckless underlings.

But Rhun, Taran sensed, was no longer the feckless princeling he had known on the Isle of Mona.

He was making his way across the room to where Merry stood among a circle of befrilled females and their feckless swains.

However, most of us were inclined to laugh at the thought of Antonius-not a monster like brother Hybrida, admittedly, but an amiable and feckless idiot, certainly-being given a huge command like eradicating piracy from one end of Our Sea to its other.

Yet still do these shine as veritable Magi in comparison to the feckless rattlepates who adorn the pantheon of Sfinctrian necromancy.

Cradossk was a wilier old reptile, though-Boba Fett even had a grudging respect for the head of the Bounty Hunters Guild, from some long-ago encounters with him-and would know just what the score was with his feckless underlings.

Many of our allies proved perfidious, feckless, or outright duplicitous.

That he was hani, and male, and blindly naive as every charge-ahead brat of a mother’s son was brought up to be, worse, he was a feckless fool of an innocent like Dahan had been, and the world wasn’t kind to them, the old ways aunt Pyanfar had sent her back to didn’t by the gods work, and she didn’t care what her biology nagged at her to do.

That he was hani, and male, and blindly naive as every charge-ahead brat of a mother's son was brought up to be, worse, he was a feckless fool of an innocent like Dahan had been, and the world wasn't kind to them, the old ways aunt Pyanfar had sent her back to didn't by the gods work, and she didn't care what her biology nagged at her to do.

As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless, waste strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers…"

Middle-aged teachers, muscular lorry drivers, wretched apparatchiks and feckless students wandered with expressions of recognition, as in I know you.

Ackabar Anders, the starlight meanderer, profligate poltroon, feckless philanderer.

Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being.

Bong-Bong Gad explained to me, using a coy local euphemism for NPA, or New People's Army, a supposedly revolutionary, but evidently somewhat feckless guerilla organization descended in a direct line from the Hukbalahaps, or Huks, the fighters who resisted the Nipponese occupation (but not so desultorily) in WW2.