Efficient means getting the result without wasting time, money or energy. An efficient system, fuel efficient, ruthlessly efficient.
It differs usefully from effective: effective means it works, and efficient means it works without waste. Something can be effective and hopelessly inefficient. In physics and engineering, efficiency is a measurable ratio of useful output to total input. Note energy-efficient; efficiency, which also names a small flat in American English; and that calling a person efficient is praise with a faint chill in it.
1adjectiveefficientGetting the result without wasting time or energy.
“The new system is efficient and nobody can understand it.”
synonyms: economical, streamlined
efficient is a quality of avoiding waste.
Latin efficiens comes from efficere, to accomplish — ex-, out, plus facere, to make. Effect, efficacy and efficient are the same verb, and an efficient cause in old philosophy was the thing that actually brought something about.
Proto-Indo-European
*dʰeh₁-
Latin
efficientem
English, today
efficient
Built from
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.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA