How to Use incompetent in a Sentence

incompetent

adjective
  • The defendant was declared incompetent to stand trial.
  • The patient is mentally incompetent.
  • He is too incompetent to be trusted with such an important responsibility.
  • But the Jets have already pushed their pieces to the middle and would look incompetent if this deal doesn’t get done.
    Michael Arinze, Chicago Tribune, 21 Mar. 2023
  • Trump tried to turn the focus less on Biden’s age than the fact that the president, in his words, was incompetent.
    Ted Johnson, Deadline, 28 June 2024
  • The more one had, the more likely one would be declared incompetent.
    Shannon Toll, The Conversation, 23 Oct. 2023
  • Even Democrats have agreed that – that he's been completely incompetent and not on the ball there, so to say.
    Nbc Universal, NBC News, 21 Jan. 2024
  • And in the 2019 bank robbery case, she was found incompetent to stand trial.
    David K. Li, NBC News, 26 July 2022
  • Pause for a walk, some tea, deep breaths Think driver who was yelled at is just incompetent?
    Lizzy Acker, oregonlive, 7 Mar. 2023
  • She has been deemed incompetent by the nursing home and therefore can’t name me as a contact.
    Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times, 28 July 2023
  • Good people won’t want to work hard to line the pockets of incompetent or mean leaders.
    Kelly Tyler Byrnes, Forbes, 3 June 2021
  • The suspect in the Boulder shooting was deemed incompetent to stand trial in March.
    Anna Kaplan, Forbes, 14 May 2022
  • Hawthorne was indicted in May on the same charges in the case, but in August was declared incompetent to stand trial.
    Elizabeth Zavala, San Antonio Express-News, 24 Nov. 2021
  • Barr said in the interview that Trump agreed that his legal team might be incompetent.
    BostonGlobe.com, 28 June 2021
  • Two — ages 14 and 10 — were found incompetent to stand trial.
    jsonline.com, 20 Apr. 2022
  • Hundreds of inmates in the Bexar County jail have been deemed incompetent to stand trial, but that could change soon.
    Scott Huddleston, San Antonio Express-News, 3 Apr. 2023
  • Writing a nasty review to point out how incompetent a business is can hurt that business for years to come.
    Jennifer Coy, Forbes, 9 Dec. 2021
  • Your generals seemed incompetent, even a few of them were drunks.
    Terry Pluto, cleveland, 16 Jan. 2021
  • At the end of the day our two big incompetent behemoths function as a unifying force in a nation with too few.
    Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 13 May 2021
  • For months, Prigozhin had berated them as incompetent, corrupt and out-of-touch.
    Mary Ilyushina, Anchorage Daily News, 26 June 2023
  • But don’t come at me for being incompetent and clueless as a parent.
    Saul Austerlitz, The Atlantic, 5 Mar. 2024
  • People who have been deemed incompetent sit in county jails until a spot opens.
    Teri Figueroa, San Diego Union-Tribune, 13 July 2023
  • The incompetent Communist Party of#Cuba cannot feed or protect the people from the virus.
    Star Tribune, 13 July 2021
  • The mistreatment lands between the incompetent and the provocative.
    Sam Knight, The New Yorker, 1 Dec. 2021
  • August 2014 Judge Michael Bohren finds Geyser incompetent and suspends the prosecution of the charges against her.
    Jim Riccioli, USA TODAY, 12 Apr. 2024
  • One of those residents had been found incompetent to vote by a court, but the others had not, according to the sheriff's office.
    Patrick Marley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2 Nov. 2021
  • Or what happens if the land owners under the law are declared incompetent.
    Mark Trahant, Star Tribune, 8 May 2021
  • The film’s younger guys dress in fake fur and act like Neanderthals, while the middle-aged men who have jobs are portrayed as incompetent nincompoops.
    Susan Pinker, WSJ, 21 Sep. 2023
  • White slammed the current media members as lazy, incompetent, or both.
    Brian Mazique, Forbes, 16 Oct. 2024
  • And if all of those systems are either corrupt or bankrupt or incompetent, then that doesn't happen.
    Dana Taylor, USA TODAY, 23 Sep. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'incompetent.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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