unlovely

comparative unlovelier · superlative unloveliest

1. unattractive, ugly

   Francis's own unlovely tunic, and that of his female colleague Clare, foundress of parallel communities for women, are lovingly preserved and displayed by the nuns of St Clare in Assisi […]

   2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin, published 2010, page 404

   3 more examples

   But while she was resolved to say an affectionate farewell to Philip, how she looked forward to that evening walk in the still, fleckered shade of the hollows, away from all that was harsh and unlovely; […]

   1860, George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons

   […] an ocean of dereliction, blackened tenements, public drunkenness, dozens of unlovely skyscrapers, featureless housing schemes. It was as if this was all that Glasgow deserved. And yet the city still had a lot of bazazz.

   1990, Seán Damer, Glasgow: Going for a Song, page 203

   Even today Lambeth is a singularly unlovely part of the British capital, jammed anonymously between the great fan of roads and railway lines that take commuters in and out of the city center from the southern counties.

   2005, Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman, HarperCollins, page 6

plural unlovelies

1. An unattractive or ugly thing or person.

   1982, United Press International, "Clearly, an ugly dog", 2 August. A hairless runt of a mutt named Chi-chi defeated them all in the 13th annual Ugliest Dog in the World contest: such unlovelies as the moth-eaten chow and the bulldog with a bad eye.

   2 more examples

   But the uptake of Irish studies by a range of migrant unlovelies clearly involves their expressing a quality of interest in the subject distinguishable from the harmless "inherent interest" which she so values and which presumably is palpable to "anybody", other than them.

   1997, Sabina Sharkey, “Irish Cultural Studies and the Politics of Irish Studies”, in Jim McGuigan, editor, Cultural Methodologies, SAGE, page 156

   Many intriguing unlovelies are found in “The Boxtrolls,” a new 3-D animated fable that lifts liberally from the sketches and dark sensibility of Alan Snow’s creepy-good children’s novel “Here Be Monsters.”

   2014 September 25, Betsy Sharkey, “Review: Any way you slice it, ‘Boxtrolls’ is an unwieldy visual feast”, in Los Angeles Times