Meaning & use
short-staffed
Last updated
Meaning
adjectivecomparable
Having fewer workers than needed to do the work properly.
Grammar: Often after be: The shop is short-staffed. Also before a noun: a short-staffed team.
Patterns
- be short-staffed
- short-staffed because of something
The restaurant was short-staffed on Friday night, so service was slow.
Hospitals are often short-staffed during the winter flu season.
We are short-staffed this week because two colleagues are on vacation.
Common combinations
- badly short-staffed
- The school is badly short-staffed after several teachers left.
- chronically short-staffed
- The clinic is chronically short-staffed.
- a short-staffed team
- A short-staffed team struggled to meet the deadline.
- short-staffed because of illness
- The airline was short-staffed because of illness.
Synonyms and how they differ
- understaffed
- Understaffed is more formal and often describes a lasting problem, while short-staffed can be temporary.
- shorthanded
- Shorthanded is more informal and also used for crews, such as on a ship.
- undermanned
- Undermanned is rarer and old-fashioned, because it implies the workers are men.
Opposites
Word family
- staff noun
- the people who work for an organization
- staffing noun
- the number of workers employed
- understaffed adjective
- having too few workers
Commonly confused: short-staffed or short of staff?
short-staffed vs short of staff
Short of staff has the same meaning but uses a phrase rather than a compound adjective.
Practice
The cafe closed early because it was ___ and nobody could cover the evening shift.
Choose one answer.
Short-staffed means too few workers. Overstaffed and well-staffed mean the opposite, and short-sighted is about vision or planning.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “short-staffed”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.