unpleasant
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Middle English unplesaunt, equivalent to un- + pleasant.
Pronunciation
[edit]Adjective
[edit]unpleasant (comparative unpleasanter or more unpleasant, superlative unpleasantest or most unpleasant)
- Not pleasant.
- c. 1596–1598 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii]:
- O sweet Portia,
Here are a few of the unpleasant’st words
That ever blotted paper!
- 1722, Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year[1], London: E. Nutt, page 214:
- It was indeed one admirable piece of Conduct in the said Magistrates, that the Streets were kept constantly clear, and free from all manner of frightful Objects, dead Bodies, or any such things as were indecent or unpleasant, unless where any Body fell down suddenly or died in the Streets […]
- 1811, [Jane Austen], chapter 35, in Sense and Sensibility […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] C[harles] Roworth, […], and published by T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC:
- The very circumstance, in its unpleasantest form, which they would each have been most anxious to avoid, had fallen on them.
- 1865 November (indicated as 1866), Lewis Carroll [pseudonym; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], “Down the Rabbit-Hole”, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, London: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, page 10:
- […] she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: […]
- 1921, Walter de la Mare, “Chapter 37”, in Memoirs of a Midget[2]:
- And I dipped into novels so like the unpleasanter parts of my own life that they might just as well have been autobiographies.
Synonyms
[edit]Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]not pleasant
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