efficient
Making good, thorough, or careful use of resources; not consuming extra. Especially, making good use of time or energy.
Adjective
- Making good, thorough, or careful use of resources; not consuming extra. Especially, making good use of time or energy.
- An efficient process would automate all the routine work.
- Our cleaners are almost too efficient: they throw away anything left out on a desk.
- An artificial kidney these days still means a refrigerator-sized dialysis machine. Such devices mimic[…]real kidneys[…]. But they are nothing like as efficient, and can cause bleeding, clotting and infection—not to...
- Expressing the proportion of consumed energy that was successfully used in a process; the ratio of useful output to total input.
- The motor is only 20% efficient at that temperature.
- Causing effects, producing results; bringing into being; initiating change (rare except in philosophical and legal expression efficient cause = causative factor or agent).
- Ownership, maintenance, or use of the automobile need not be the direct and efficient cause of the injury sustained
- It was well said of Plotinus, that the stars were significant, but not efficient. - 1614, Walter Ralegh [i.e., Walter Raleigh], The Historie of the World […], London: […] William Stansby for Walter Burre, […], →OCLC,...
- effective, efficacious
- Ye wake no more to anguish;‥ ye have borne The Chosen, the Destroyer!‥ soon his hand Shall strike the efficient blow; Soon shaking off your penal forms, shall ye, With songs of joy, amid the Eden groves, Hymn the...
- The Efficient Cause is that from which emanates the force that produces the Effect - 1856, William Dexter Wilson, An Elementary Treatise on Logic:
Origin
1398, “making,” from Old French, from Latin efficientem, nominative efficiēns, participle of efficere (“work out, accomplish”) (see effect). Meaning “productive, skilled” is from 1787. Efficiency apartment is first recorded 1930, American English.
Forms
Synonyms
Antonyms
Hyponyms
cost-effective energy-efficient energy-saving frugal fuel-efficient laboursaving businesslike well-oiled
Related
effect effective effectiveness effectivity effector effectual effectuate efficacious efficacity efficacy efficiency subefficiency potency one fell swoop kill two birds with one stone skill skillful excellent
Derived
cost-efficient ecoefficient efficient cause efficient frontier efficiently efficient market hypothesis efficientness energy-efficient energy efficient equiefficient hyperefficient Kaldor-Hicks efficient nonefficient subefficient superefficient tax-efficient ultraefficient
Noun
- A cause; something that causes an effect.
- Some are without efficient, as God; others without matter, as Angels […]. - 1643, Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, I.14:
- This implies, that something happens without a cause. If it should be said, that motive in this case is not the efficient of the action or doing — this is granted; but at the same time, for reasons already given, it is...