ugly
/ˈʌɡli/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.42 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
2
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing.
adj
Displeasing to the ear or some other sense.
adj
Offensive to one's sensibilities or morality.
adj
Example Sentences
- "the ugly view of his deformed crimes"
- "O, I have passed a miserable night, / So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams."
- "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!"
- "In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world."
- "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."
- "He played an ugly trick on us."
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-).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: ugly, uggligr