feckless

feckless
adjective
Synonyms of feckless
1
: WEAK, INEFFECTIVE
She can't rely on her feckless son.
2
: WORTHLESS, IRRESPONSIBLE
a feckless maneuver that could only serve to strengthen the enemy
—Simon Schama
fecklessly adverb
fecklessness noun

Did you know?
Someone feckless is lacking in feck. And what, you may ask, is feck? In Scots—our source of feckless—feck means "majority" or "effect." The term is ultimately an alteration of the Middle English effect. So something without feck is without effect, or ineffective. In the past, feckful (meaning "efficient, effective," "sturdy," or "powerful") made an occasional appearance. But in this case, the weak has outlived the strong: feckless is a commonly used English word, but feckful has fallen out of use.


Synonyms
counterproductive
hamstrung
ineffective
ineffectual
inefficacious
inefficient
inexpedient

Examples of feckless in a Sentence
She can't rely on her feckless son.
a well-intentioned but feckless response to the rise in school violence
Recent Examples on the Web
The isolation thrust upon Coppola’s heroines by feckless husbands and fathers results in, if not always liberation, self-discovery, newfound confidence, determination, and desire.
—Andrew Marzoni, The New Republic, 3 Nov. 2023
Israel shouldn’t give the enemy more time to use media and feckless Western leaders against it.
—WSJ, 20 Oct. 2023
Yemen’s citizens already lack protection in every imaginable way: from capricious violence, from feckless leaders, from hunger and want.
—Kareem Fahim, Washington Post, 12 Oct. 2023