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say it: SHIFT-lis
shiftless is an adjective meaning "lacking or characterized by lack of ambition or initiative; lazy". It carries one recorded sense.
lacking or characterized by lack of ambition or initiative; lazy
“a shiftless student”
“studied in a shiftless way”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for shiftless come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.