maladministration
/ˌmælədˌmɪnɪˈstɹeɪʃn̩/
maladministration means faulty, improper, or inefficient administration or management, especially by a government body; (countable) an instance of this. It carries an Arena rating of 1306, earned across 91 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, maladministration ranks #450 of 17,128 for Most Ponderous Words, #1,001 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #1,599 of 17,131 for Scariest Words, #3,259 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words.
maladministration is pronounced /ˌmælədˌmɪnɪˈstɹeɪʃn̩/.
Why “maladministration” is a great word
MALADMINISTRATION — [Noun] Faulty, improper, or inefficient administration or management, especially by a government or official body. From the prefix mal- (meaning 'bad; badly') + administration, first attested in the 1640s. Unlike “mismanagement,” a broader term for poor handling of any affair, or “corruption,” which denotes deliberate fraud, maladministration is the specific, often legalistic failure of a public trust through negligence, sloth, or procedural decay. It is the pension claim lost in triplicate for a decade, the vital report buried under a cairn of pointless meetings, and the bridge that decays while committees debate its shade of grey—a slow, quiet corrosion of function, where the system itself becomes the adversary of those it was built to serve.
Etymology
From mal- (prefix meaning ‘bad; badly’) + administration.
noun
- Faulty, improper, or inefficient administration or management, especially by a government body; (countable) an instance of this.e.g.“Near-synonyms: mismanagement, misgovernance”
- An act of incorrectly administering a religious rite; also, a religious group that permits such a practice.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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