Slipshod / adjective / slip·shod

If you've ever bought a product that fell apart as soon as you opened the package or gotten car repairs that only seem to make your car drive worse, you know what it's like to get slipshod service. Slipshod describes careless, thoughtless, and disorganized behavior or service.

Before we started using slipshod to represent poor service or products, we used the word to describe shoes that had been worn down at the heel. Nowadays, when we think of the word slipshod, we imagine slovenly behaviors, poor customer service, and malfunctioning products. In social situations, slipshod denotes people who behave in ways that are frowned upon by the rest of society.

Slipshod has the same meaning as shabby and lackadaisical. On the other hand, meticulous and painstaking are words that mean the opposite of slipshod.

In a Sentence

They suspected the auto mechanic performed slipshod work when their car made more noise after they picked it up than when they took it in.

Their slipshod customer service department rerouted all the orders to the wrong addresses in a different state.

Getting slipshod service at local businesses seems to be more common than ever before.

Etymology

The word slipshod is an adjective that initially appeared in our language during the 1500s to denote slippers or shoes that had worn down or were ill-fitting. This is where the term "slip-shoe" came from- to denote shoes that were ready to be replaced. Etymologists noticed that the word became more of a synonym for sloppy and shoddy work by the early 1800s, which is how we continue to use the word today.

Synonym

Careless, Lackadaisical

Antonym

Meticulous, Painstaking