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 console employs SteamOS as the operating system, but subsequent competitors use Windows as the OS, which can lead to a janky experience. —Julian Chokkattu, WIRED, 7 Jan. 2025

The scroll wheel is less janky, and the interface improvements are welcome. —Julian Chokkattu, WIRED, 27 Dec. 2024

Older viewers will associate the visuals with the sandbox game Garry’s Mod, which helped to define the janky, neo-Surrealist landscape of late-two-thousands Internet culture. —Jessica Winter, The New Yorker, 16 Dec. 2024

This isn’t some janky jumble that Rose has hauled cross-country in her beat-up car, then spit shined for performance. —Sara Holdren, Vulture, 20 Dec. 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