short-staffed

British  

adjective

1. lacking an adequate number of staff, assistants, etc

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Explanation

If a business is short-staffed, it has fewer workers than usual. When a small cafe is short-staffed, servers might have to help wash dishes and ring customers up at the cash register. A short-staffed workplace suffers from an inadequate number of employees. This can be an ongoing problem: "Don't go to that grocery store, they're constantly short-staffed and the lines are always too long." It can also be a temporary situation, like the day several librarians happened to call in sick, leaving the library short-staffed. The term is from the "having too few" sense of short and the verb staff, "provide with workers."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

short-staffed

Many patients will abruptly lose caregivers who have been with them for years, and facilities that are already strained will be even more short-staffed.

From Salon ● Sep. 3, 2026

The pair clocked off around an hour before their shift was due to end, the newspaper said citing sources, leaving the control tower short-staffed before the crash that killed two pilots.

From Barron's ● Aug. 27, 2026

"We're short-staffed, we're asking people to work outside of their specialties," she said.

From BBC ● Aug. 6, 2026

Assessing what went wrong after a boy died by drowning in 1985, on a day when she was short-staffed, Ms. Fash says she began to question her boss’s tight control over the system.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 24, 2026

We were driving within a week because they were short-staffed.

From "I Am the Messenger" by Markus Zusak