unpleasant

comparative unpleasanter · comparative more unpleasant · superlative unpleasantest · superlative most unpleasant

1. Not pleasant.

   O sweet Portia, / Here are a few of the unpleasant’st words / That ever blotted paper!

   c. 1596–1598 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii]

   5 more examples

   It was indeed one admirable piece of Conduct in the said Magistrates, that the Streets were kept constantly clear, and free from all manner of frightful Objects, dead Bodies, or any such things as were indecent or unpleasant, unless where any Body fell down suddenly or died in the Streets […]

   1722, Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, London: E. Nutt, page 214

   The very circumstance, in its unpleasantest form, which they would each have been most anxious to avoid, had fallen on them.

   1811, [Jane Austen], chapter 35, in Sense and Sensibility […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: […] C[harles] Roworth, […], and published by T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC

   […] she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: […]

   1865 November (indicated as 1866), Lewis Carroll [pseudonym; Charles Lutwidge Dodgson], “Down the Rabbit-Hole”, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, London: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, page 10

   And I dipped into novels so like the unpleasanter parts of my own life that they might just as well have been autobiographies.

   1921, Walter de la Mare, “Chapter 37”, in Memoirs of a Midget

   An algae bloom has killed thousands of fish in the San Francisco Bay Area in recent weeks, officials say, forcing shoreline cleanups, spreading unpleasant odor and spurring scientists to further investigate the extent of the ecological damage.

   2022 September 3, Taylor Romine and Jason Hanna, “An algae bloom has killed thousands of fish in the San Francisco Bay Area”, in CNN

   Synonyms: disagreeable, distasteful, abhorrant, abhorrent, bad, sickly, mean, infernal