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ugly

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English ugly, uggely, uglike, borrowed from Old Norse uggligr (“fearful, dreadful, horrible in appearance”), from uggr (“fear, apprehension, dread”) (possibly related to agg (“strife, hate”)), equivalent to ug +‎ -ly. Cognate with Scots ugly, uglie, Icelandic ugglegur. Meaning softened to "very unpleasant to look at" around the late 14th century, and sense of "morally offensive" attested from around 1300.

For the meaning development compare Bulgarian грозен (grozen) (< Proto-Slavic *grozьnъ), Russian стра́шный (strášnyj) (< Proto-Slavic *strašьnъ < *straxъ); Latin foedus (< Proto-Indo-European *bʰeyh₂-).

Pronunciation

Adjective

ugly (comparative uglier, superlative ugliest)

  1. Displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing.
    • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 48:
      the ugly view of his deformed crimes
    • c. 1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Richard the Third: […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iv]:
      O, I have passed a miserable night, / So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams.
    • 1843, Thomas Carlyle, “XVII: The Beginnings”, in Past and Present, book 2:
      When the poor man’s integuments, no longer nourished from within, become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity, wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier; […] — yes then, you may say, his usefulness once more is quite obstructed; […] it is time that he take to bed, and prepare for departure, which cannot now be distant!
    • 1957, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Viking Press, →OCLC:
      In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world.
    • 2014 August 28, Arit John, “No One Heard Anything Obama Just Said Because His Tan Suit Was So Loud”, in The Atlantic‎[1], archived from the original on 30 November 2025:
      President Obama gave an important press conference today and even took questions from the press, but all of this was overshadowed by the fact that Obama debuted one of the ugliest suits in the history of this great nation.
  2. Displeasing to the ear or some other sense.
  3. Offensive to one's sensibilities or morality.
    He played an ugly trick on us.
    • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:
      All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech. In the present connexion—or rather as a transition from the subject that started their conversation—such talk had been distressingly out of place.
  4. (Southern US) Ill-natured; crossgrained; quarrelsome.
    an ugly temper; to feel ugly
  5. (figuratively, derogatory) Unpleasant; disagreeable; likely to cause trouble or loss.
    an ugly rumour; an ugly customer; an ugly wound
    With all this competition, expect things to get ugly.

Synonyms

Antonyms

Derived terms

Compound words and expressions

Descendants

  • Sranan Tongo: ogri

Translations

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
Translations to be checked

Noun

ugly (countable and uncountable, plural uglies)

  1. (slang, uncountable) Ugliness.
  2. (slang) An ugly person or thing.
  3. (logistics, informal) Any product whose size and shape prevents it from fitting neatly on a pallet.
    • 1983, Australian Transport, page 16:
      These are firstly for products which need a cool room; secondly for products which can be stored on a standard pallet without overhang; and thirdly for products known as "the uglies" which always overhang a standard pallet.
    • 2022, Alan Rushton, Phil Croucher, Peter Baker, The Handbook of Logistics and Distribution Management, page 591:
      Non-standard products (abnormal or 'uglies'): many distribution operations are designed to cater for standard palletized products.
  4. (UK, informal, dated) A shade for the face, projecting from a bonnet.
    • 1857, Charles Kingsley, “(please specify the page)”, in Two Years Ago, volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC:
      […] camp-stools, telescopes, poetry-books, blue uglies, red petticoats, and parasols of every hue.

Translations

Verb

ugly (third-person singular simple present uglies, present participle uglying, simple past and past participle uglied)

  1. (transitive, nonstandard) To make ugly (sometimes with up).
    • 2011, P. A. Krishnan, Muddy River:
      I move noiselessly, eat my food carefully without uglying the dining table with its remnants, fold my bedsheets in neat rectangles and place them on the bed in perfect symmetry.
    • 2012, Najib George Awad, And Freedom Became a Public-square, page 197:
      There is time when the absence of either integrity or humility has uglied the face of the church before the world and turned Christianity into just another cocoon of condemnation and hypocrisy.
    • 2014, Jonathan Crocker, A Dream of Hope and Sorrow:
      He had spent half of his journey mulling over how he would savour his revenge. He could already envision her pretty little form lying prone at his feet. He would take great pleasure in uglying her up a little before killing her.

Anagrams

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