inelegant.

Awkward, ungraceful, or needlessly clumsy in form or execution.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• an inelegant solution
• inelegant phrasing

On the page

The inelegant repair held through the winter.

She kept the inelegant sentence because its awkwardness belonged to the speaker.

Usage notes

Primary category: literary. Forms: Comparative more inelegant; superlative most inelegant where gradation is meaningful. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings.