janky

adjective

ˈjaŋ-kē 

jankier; jankiest

informal

: of very poor quality : junky

… most of the vehicles on Bismuth were janky unregistered pick-ups that reeked of fish water.

—Corwin Ericson

also : not functioning properly or adequately : faulty

Hahn was incredibly down-to-earth in her normal-looking home with her somewhat janky Wi-Fi.

—Chris Murphy

"My family had medical debt, because we live in the jankiest medical system in the developed world."

—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Examples of janky in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

That has led to a janky, unstable product, as evidenced by his disastrous technology failures when interviewing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023 and Trump a couple of months ago. —David Goldman, CNN, 22 Oct. 2024

The futures market seems convinced the data’s janky. —Yeo Boon Ping, CNBC, 11 Oct. 2024

The original film was made in the ‘70s and is set in the far future, and yet the Nostromo’s leaks and janky chains, not to mention the bizarre pseudo-mechanical design of the Xenomorph, make the film feel old and new at once. —James Grebey, TIME, 16 Aug. 2024

Kids who were lucky or privileged enough (or both) to gain access to computers that ran BASIC—the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, janky Sinclair boxes in the UK—immediately started writing games, text adventures, chatbots, databases. —Clive Thompson, WIRED, 29 July 2024

Word History

Etymology

of uncertain origin

Note: Early records of the word indicate an origin in African-American speech. Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, hypothesizes that it represents "a regional, affected, or colloquial pronunciation of junky entry 1." According to Clarence Major, in Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (New York, 1994), it is "probably a variant of jinxed" (see jinx entry 2).

First Known Use

1989, in the meaning defined above