adjective
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of shiftless
Explanation
If someone calls you shiftless, it's not a compliment — they're saying that you're lazy and unambitious! Someone who's shiftless avoids hard work at any cost, sometimes through procrastination. Do you hate getting sweaty or feeling tired at the end of a long day of labor? When volunteers are requested, do you slump in your seat instead of raising your hand? If so, you can call yourself shiftless. This adjective comes from a now-uncommon use of the noun shift as "resources." So if you don't have the get-up-and-go — or shift — to do a job, you're shiftless.
Vocabulary lists containing shiftless
Power Suffix: -less
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
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Life Is So Good
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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.
I knew it was chosen and served with care, and at a moment where I was feeling sleepy and shiftless, it called me.
From Slate • Jan. 11, 2023
Or the shiftless hack who hated his profession?
From Los Angeles Times • Feb. 16, 2021
Colm Meaney plays a shiftless guy in late-80s Ireland who is reasonably happy on welfare but has a Damascene conversion to entrepreneurialism.
From The Guardian • Apr. 16, 2020
“The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people,” Flannery O’Connor wrote with merciless accuracy, “those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.”
From Washington Post • Apr. 11, 2016
With him was a man who was known only as Z. Mr. Trepid thought of Z as a shiftless man, slipping in and out of town like a slithery possum.
From "Ruby Holler" by Sharon Creech
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.
