haphazard
/hapˈhazəd
/adjective
Lacking any obvious principle of organization: the music business works in a haphazard fashion...
- Thus, heterogeneity in beliefs within the organization makes performance more haphazard.
- These difficulties are unfortunately compounded by a haphazard organization.
- Organization was haphazard; there were far too few bishops, and some were invalidly consecrated.
Synonyms
random, unplanned, unsystematic, unmethodical, disorganized, disorderly, irregular, indiscriminate, chaotic, hit-and-miss, arbitrary, orderless, aimless, undirected, careless, casual, slapdash, slipshod;
chance, accidental
informal higgledy-piggledy
Derivatives
haphazardness
- It is obviously a matter for concern for you and your colleagues, but let me ask: the haphazardness and the inconsistent application, has it got any proportionate implications?
- Indeed, it was precisely this contingency - the haphazardness of facts - that made them a boring subject for the ancients.
- I am perturbed - nobody ever talks to us about these considerations as lawyers, whereas sociologists for example spend much of their undergraduate lives being familiarised with research methodology and warned against haphazardness.
Origin
Late 16th century: from hap1 + hazard.
This is composed of Middle English hap (see happy) ‘luck, fortune’ (from Old Norse happ) and hazard, which was initially a gambling game played with two dice in which the chances are complicated by arbitrary rules. It reached English in the Middle Ages through Arabic, Spanish, and French, but goes right back to Persian or Turkish zar ‘dice’. In the 16th century hazard came to mean ‘a chance’ and ‘a risk of loss or harm’.