What It Means
Something or someone described as lackadaisical is lacking in interest, enthusiasm, or zest.
Feeling particularly lackadaisical in the summer heat, they lazily tossed a ball back and forth.
Lackadaisical in Context
“The defense was lackadaisical at best, while the offense wasn’t much better.” — Shreyas Laddha, The Daily Gazette (Schenectady, New York), 7 Feb. 2026
Did You Know?
We’re too enthusiastic about the lexicon to be lackadaisical about words, but lackadaisical itself is rooted in the sort of sorrow that can put a damper on one’s passion for vocabulary expansion. When folks living from the late 17th to the late 19th century had one of those days when nothing goes right, they could cry “Lackaday!” to express their sorrow and disappointment as a shortened form of the expression “alack the day.” (Alack is an interjection used to express sorrow or regret.) By the mid-1700s, the adjective lackadaisical had been formed to describe such weary and exasperated folks, as well as their half-hearted doings and sayings. Today the word has lost some of its dreariness and most often describes the languid and lazy.
www.merriam-webster.com
