Dysfunctional

How to spell dysfunctional

13 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce dysfunctional

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dysfunctional mean?

1. adjectiveNot operating normally or properly; impaired in the way it works or behaves.

Dysfunctional in a sentence

• The whole department had become dysfunctional after the merger.

• Years of silence had made their family relationships deeply dysfunctional.

Where does dysfunctional come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern compound that fuses a Greek prefix with a Latin root. The prefix dys- comes from Greek and literally means 'bad', 'ill', or 'impaired', the same element that gives us 'dyslexia' and 'dyspepsia'. The middle of the word descends from the Latin functio, meaning 'a performing' or 'an execution of a task', which came into English as 'function' by way of French in the 1500s. 'Functional' (working as intended) followed, and only in the twentieth century did medicine and sociology bolt on the dys- prefix to describe something that fails to perform properly. By the 1970s 'dysfunctional' had spread into everyday speech, especially when describing troubled families and broken organisations. The spelling trap lives at the front: it is dys-, with a 'y', not 'dis-', because the part is the Greek 'bad', not the Latin 'apart'.

How the word is built

• dys- (bad, abnormal, impaired)
• funct (from Latin functio: performance, execution)
• -ion (state)
• -al (adjective suffix)