Dysfunctional means not working together as a family should. A dysfunctional family, dysfunctional relationships, deeply dysfunctional.
It came out of clinical psychology and spread into ordinary speech, where it now describes organisations and governments as readily as households. The prefix dys- means bad or difficult, so a dysfunctional system does function — badly — which is a different claim from broken. Note dysfunction; and dyslexia and dyspepsia, built the same way.
1adjectivedysfunctionalNot working together as it should.
“The office was so dysfunctional that nobody knew who was responsible for anything.”
dysfunctional is a quality of poor working.
From dysfunction + -al.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA