UNPROFITABLE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does unprofitable mean? 

• UNPROFITABLE (adjective)
  The adjective UNPROFITABLE has 1 sense:

1. producing little or no profit or gain

  Familiarity information: UNPROFITABLE used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• UNPROFITABLE (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Producing little or no profit or gain

Context example:

deposits abandoned by mining companies as unprofitable

Similar:

dead; idle (not yielding a return)

lean (not profitable or prosperous)

marginal (producing at a rate that barely covers production costs)

unremunerative (not yielding profit or recompense)

Also:

unproductive (not producing or capable of producing)

unsuccessful (not successful; having failed or having an unfavorable outcome)

useless (having no beneficial use or incapable of functioning usefully)

Antonym:

profitable (yielding material gain or profit)

Derivation:

unprofitability; unprofitableness (the quality of affording no gain or no benefit or no profit)

 Context examples 

He was in one of his moods, for the day had been both unprofitable and unsatisfactory, and he was wishing he could live it over again.

(Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott)

She felt how unprofitable contention would be.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

And as to the woman who would not take my handkerchief in exchange for her bread, why, she was right, if the offer appeared to her sinister or the exchange unprofitable.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He had, in fact, though his sisters were now doing all they could for him, by calling him poor Richard, been nothing better than a thick-headed, unfeeling, unprofitable Dick Musgrove, who had never done anything to entitle himself to more than the abbreviation of his name, living or dead.

(Persuasion, by Jane Austen)

If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He had found the law a most unprofitable study, and was now absolutely resolved on being ordained, if I would present him to the living in question—of which he trusted there could be little doubt, as he was well assured that I had no other person to provide for, and I could not have forgotten my revered father's intentions.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)