clunky
Americanadjective
adjective
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making a clunking noise
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informal ponderously ungraceful or unsophisticated
clunky boots
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awkward or unsophisticated
then you guffaw at clunky dialogue
Etymology
Origin of clunky
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Joe Hart: City were clunky against Arsenal in Cardiff but I don't think they will over-react to one poor game.
From BBC ● Aug. 20, 2026
He found the buying and selling of global securities clunky and unsatisfying with traditional brokerages, according to a 2023 profile in Hunan Today, a Chinese newspaper based in Li’s home province.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 9, 2026
Like a book publisher shaping a clunky early draft into a bestseller, an executive at the company suggested the scientists punch up the language, which they did.
From Salon ● Jun. 26, 2026
The clunky machine had around the same amount of computing power as a modern-day toaster.
From MarketWatch ● May 23, 2026
That third “herons” is clunky, even confusing, for the same reason that repeating the name Stanley Goldfarb in the funeral joke would have been confusing.
From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker
Making it even broader and clunkier won’t help.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 21, 2025
In reality, the transition towards that future is a little clunkier — and a little more fraught with questions about whether it’s the one we really want.
From Salon ● Jan. 22, 2024
The analytic mode of reasoning is clunkier and more time consuming, often exemplified by “reason, mathematics, and cost-benefit analysis,” says Slovic.
From National Geographic ● Aug. 17, 2023
As the National Hurricane Center and the World Meteorological Organization explain, affixing names makes things simpler for keeping track, beating the hay out of using something clunkier, such as, say, longitude-latitude coordinates.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 25, 2022
There are a few clunkier works here that detract from the whole, particularly digital prints on vinyl from the late 1990s and early aughts.
From New York Times ● Jul. 28, 2022
Part of it is Sullivan’s brusque direction, which speeds through some character-building dialogue then lingers on scenes that have the clunkiest exposition.
From New York Times ● Nov. 4, 2021
Even the dungeons, which are the clunkiest parts of the game, are inventive; they’re shopping malls rather than typical dungeons, and boast mundane objects like cellphones and TVs as enemies.
From Slate ● Aug. 19, 2021
Even at its clunkiest, it leaves you breathless at the heights of personal expression he achieved.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 18, 2021
That is admittedly the film’s clunkiest line, meant to describe the technological power of the Grid, but representative of its largely uninspired screenplay.
From The Verge ● Oct. 18, 2017
Even then, student accounts were invariably on the university's oldest, clunkiest machine.
From Underground by Suelette Dreyfus
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
