feckless means lacking purpose. It carries an Arena rating of 1698, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, feckless ranks #5 of 7 for Ghost Positives, #237 of 13,217 for Most Incisive Words, #629 of 13,217 for Most Elegant Words, #644 of 13,217 for Words That Escaped Their Books.
feckless is pronounced /ˈfɛkləs/.
Why “feckless” is a great word
Feckless means utterly lacking in vigor, effectiveness, or purpose; irresponsible and incompetent in essence. Its etymology is from Scots 'feckless', an aphetic variant of 'effectless', from 'effect' (meaning 'value, vigor') + the suffix '-less' (meaning 'without'), first attested in the 1590s and popularized in the 19th century by Thomas Carlyle. Unlike 'reckless', which implies a rash, energetic charge toward disaster, or 'ineffectual', which neutrally denotes a failure to achieve a result, 'feckless' describes a profound inertia of the spirit, a moral and practical flaccidity. It is the posture of the heir who lets the ancestral estate molder, the bureaucrat who files a vital petition into oblivion through neglect, and the scent of damp wool in a room where a fire has been allowed to gutter out—the quiet, accumulating dust of potential surrendered without a fight.
Etymology
From Scots feckless, variant of Scots fectless (“ineffectual”) (an aphetic variant of effectless), equivalent to effect + -less.
adj
- Lacking purpose.“It is the beauty of great games when they are played at their highest level and the extraordinary thing now is that we do not have to trawl back through all the years of your inexorable progress from feckless beach boy to master sportsman.”
- Without skill, ineffective, incompetent.“This was the West Lancashire Railway, an ambitious but feckless little concern which, in a life lasting a quarter of a century, never earned a dividend, failed to keep up its debenture payments (despite a dangerous attempt to do so by issuing more debentures) and ended up in the hands of a receiver.”
- Lacking the courage to act in any meaningful way.“China is “proving to be a feckless friend for its authoritarian allies,” Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China under President Joe Biden, wrote on X.”
- Lacking vitality.
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