unpalatable

comparative more unpalatable · superlative most unpalatable

1. Unpleasant to the taste.

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

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

   2 more examples

   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 January 12, Baroness Orczy [i.e., Emma Orczy], The Scarlet Pimpernel, popular edition, London: Greening & Co., published 20 March 1912, →OCLC

   Experimentally, some ink has been shown to be unpalatable to fish (Wood et al. 2010) and observationally, ink can also function as an attractant to predators to give cephalopods a bit more time to escape.

   2017 August 9, Mark Carnall, “Why do cephalopods produce ink? And what's ink made of, anyway?”, in The Guardian, archived from the original on 15 Mar 2023

2. broadlyfigurativelyUnpleasant or disagreeable.

   But enough of this. Homely truth is unpalatable.

   1876, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Hartford, Conn.: The American Publishing Company, →OCLC

   3 more examples

   "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.

   1895, Anthony Hope, Frivolous Cupid

   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.

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

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

   2016 February 8, Marwan Bishara, “Why Obama fails the leadership test in the Middle East”, in Al Jazeera English, archived from the original on 20 Feb 2018

plural unpalatables

1. Anything distasteful.

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

   1934, Your Germs and Mine, page 295

   2 more examples

   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.

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

   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.

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