unpalatable

English

Etymology

un- +‎ palatable

Adjective

unpalatable (comparative more unpalatable, superlative most unpalatable)

1. Unpleasant to the taste.
   • 1905 January 12, Baroness Orczy [i.e., Emma Orczy], The Scarlet Pimpernel, popular edition, London: Greening & Co., published 20 March 1912, →OCLC:

     In one corner of the room there was a huge hearth, over which hung a stock-pot, with a not altogether unpalatable odour of hot soup emanating therefrom.

   • 1905, Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC:

     She did not mean to pamper herself any longer, to go without food because her surroundings made it unpalatable.

2. (by extension) Unpleasant or disagreeable.
   • 1876, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Hartford, Conn.: The American Publishing Company, →OCLC:

     But enough of this. Homely truth is unpalatable.

   • 1895, Anthony Hope, Frivolous Cupid‎^[1]:

     "This is very perplexing," said Duke Deodonato, and he knit his brows; for as he gazed upon the beauty of the damsel, it seemed to him a thing unnatural, undesirable, unpalatable, unpleasant, and unendurable, that she should wed Dr. Fusbius.

   • 2003, Jack Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, page 196:

     A plain, seemingly graceless stylist, his rather unpalatable movies, full of rabid, sloggingly orchestrated physical pain and psychic damage, picture crime as a monstrous, miasmal evil, divesting it of any glamour it ever had.

   • 2016 February 8, Marwan Bishara, “Why Obama fails the leadership test in the Middle East”, in Al Jazeera English‎^[2]:

     Their capacity for talking so much and saying so little is astonishing. Their verbosity is unpalatable.

Synonyms

• distasteful

Translations

unpleasant to the taste

• Bashkir: тәмһеҙ (təmheź)
• Belarusian: нясма́чны (njasmáčny)
• Bulgarian: неапетитен (bg) (neapetiten)
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 難吃／难吃 (zh) (nánchī)

• Czech: nedobrý m
• Dutch: onsmakelijk (nl)
• Finnish: pahanmakuinen (fi)
• French: dégoutant (fr), peu appétissant
• Hungarian: rossz ízű
• Italian: sgradevole (it)
• Maori: kōtuhi
• Polish: niesmaczny (pl)
• Russian: невку́сный (ru) (nevkúsnyj)
• Spanish: desagradable (es), incomible (es), intragable
• Swedish: oaptitlig (sv)
• Ukrainian: несмачни́й (nesmačnýj)

(by extension) unpleasant or disagreeable

• Dutch: onaangenaam (nl)
• French: désagréable (fr)

Noun

unpalatable (plural unpalatables)

1. Anything distasteful.
   • 1934, Your Germs and Mine, page 295:

     In the severer cases of hookworm the patient sometimes has an appetite for soil, paper, hair, clay, chalk, starch, and other unpalatables.

   • 1990, Dido Davies, Andrew Davies, William Gerhardie: A Biography, page 164:

     His wife, a small woman who walked always on high heels, borrowed Gerhardie's primus stove several times a day to cook her husband gargantuan meals of cockles, mussels, snails, and other such unpalatables.

   • 2019, Paul Williams, Andreas Krebs, The Illusion of Invincibility:

     Denial and disbelief tend to be the default, not a pragmatic embracing of unthinkables and unpalatables. The way things have been is not the way they are and will soon be.