half-hearted

British  

adjective

1. without enthusiasm or determination

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Other Word Forms

• half-heartedly
  adverb
• half-heartedness
  noun

Explanation

Use the adjective half-hearted to describe someone whose heart is not really in what they are doing. If you're a half-hearted member of your school marching band, you're not very excited about playing your tuba during halftime at football games. You might show up for awkward family dinners with your strange cousins, but you don't look forward to it and you can't wait until it's over. You're a half-hearted participant, and when your weird relatives leave, you probably give a half-hearted wave goodbye. The word can also be spelled "halfhearted."

Example Sentences

There’s Mrs. Duggan’s sitting room, for example, with its “faint, high whistling of the gas fire”; and “the weary clatter of half-hearted washing-up” in a depressing cafe.

From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 24, 2026

And these memos lay bare the extent to which the work product underpinning these decisions is often half-hearted and vibes-based; animated more by grievance and hurt feelings than neutral legal rules.

From Slate • Apr. 21, 2026

So by those standards, what the California Highway Patrol discovered when they pulled over a driver in the carpool lane in West Covina recently would be half-hearted.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 17, 2026

Instead, mitigation was uneven and half-hearted, stoking frustration without effectively preventing spread of the disease, and paving the way for the backlash that followed.

From Salon • Mar. 14, 2025

I made a half-hearted attempt to find my hat in the dark but gave up almost instantly and stuffed my hair haphazardly into the neck of my shirt.

From "Glitch" by Laura Martin