utility knife
designed mainly to be useful rather than attractive or fashionable :
She wore an outdoorsy utility jacket but somehow managed to make farming look chic.
After the war material and good design were in short supply and the country produced what was called utility clothing.
It was a student's room with utility furniture and posters on the walls.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Competitors & participants in sports & games
anchorman
attacker
back four
baller
ballplayer
challenger
competitor
jumper
keeper
logroller
long-jumper
longboarder
major league
mid-table
retire
torero
toxophilite
traceur
trampolinist
trialist

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Useful or advantageous

utility | American Dictionary

utility
noun
us/juˈtɪl·ɪ·t̬i/

utilitynoun (USEFULNESS)

[ U ]
ability to satisfy a particular need; usefulness:
Its basic utility lies in being able to drive where other vehicles can’t go.

utilitynoun (PUBLIC SERVICE)

[ C ]
a supply of gas, electricity, water, or telephone service to homes and businesses, or a business that supplies such services:
a utility bill
After I call the movers, I’ll call to have the utilities turned on.

utility | Business English

utility
noun
uk /juːˈtɪləti/uspluralutilities
[ C ]
a service for supplying electricity, gas, etc.:
utility bill/company/costsPlease enclose a copy of a recent utility bill as proof of address.
the rising cost of utilities
[ C ]
a large company that provides a service such as electricity, gas, etc.:
We are a natural gas utility serving over a million customers in the Michigan area.
With energy consumption rising, many public utilities are struggling to meet peak-time demand.
[ C ] IT
a computer program that is used to do a particular task:
The program includes a set of utilities and file recovery tools for advanced users.
[ U ]
how useful something is:
The product became popular thanks to its high utility in many different situations.

Examples of utility

utility
We were dumbfounded to find the utilities were out.
No information about preferences or utilities is incorporated into the description.
The second also includes clothing, shelter, utilities, and transportation (947 pesos).
In doing so, they guarantee that weights have to be uniform in the aggregation of individual utilities.
The latter is efficiency on the sub-space of utilities.
We will salvage a version of the claim in which utilities stand for themselves, without representing preferences.
Since their expected utilities are the same, the rationality of choosing one cannot differ from that of choosing the other.
Enhancing future utilities by investing in the quality of future consumption are normal activities in the lives of most people.
The corresponding sequence of posterior expected utilities must be found for different values of the covariates (where relevant) and for any non-standard treatments.
Their experimental set-up considered several judges who ranked all plants simultaneously and where the latent utilities per judge were allowed to be correlated.
The knowledge manager provides utilities to dynamically add 0modify classes 0 instances of synthesis elements stored in the library.
In particular, it may be considered desirable to have universal access to basic utilities and essential services.
Furthermore, there is no guarantee that cooking raw utilities would invariably neutralize the dilemma.
The problem, of course, is that we neither know the actual expected utilities, nor observe every relevant variable.
Although payoffs may not have been symmetric, this part of my argument only relies on ordinal utilities.
See all examples of utility
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.