unhandsome

English

Etymology

Adjective

unhandsome (comparative more unhandsome or unhandsomer, superlative most unhandsome or unhandsomest)

Not handsome.
- 1598–1599 (first performance), William Shakespeare, “Much Adoe about Nothing”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene i]:
  Why, i’ faith, methinks she’s too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise and too little for a great praise: only this commendation I can afford her, that were she other than she is, she were unhandsome; and being no other but as she is, I do not like her.
- c. 1790, Robert Burns, Letter to Mr. Charles K. Sharpe of Hoddam, in J. Logie Robertson (ed.), Burns’s Letters,^[1]
  The coat on my back is no more: I shall not speak evil of the dead. It would be equally unhandsome and ungrateful to find fault with my old surtout, which so kindly supplies and conceals the want of that coat.
- 1814 May 9, [Jane Austen], chapter III, in Mansfield Park: […], volume II, London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC, pages 53–54:
  Fanny could have said a great deal, but it was safer to say nothing, and leave untouched all Miss Crawford's resources, her accomplishments, her spirits, her importance, her friends, lest it should betray her into any observations seemingly unhandsome.
- 1889, Mark Twain, chapter 27, in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court‎^[2]:
  When he got his lubberly sandals on, and his long robe of coarse brown linen cloth, which hung straight from his neck to his ankle-bones, he was no longer the comeliest man in his kingdom, but one of the unhandsomest and most commonplace and unattractive.
- 1959, Anthony Burgess, Beds in the East (The Malayan Trilogy), published 1972, page 582:
  He was a big chubby man, in his middle thirties, the muscle of his rugger days now settling placidly to reminiscent fat. He was not unhandsome.

Derived terms