ugly

adjective

1. 1

   Displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing.

   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.

2. 2

   Displeasing to the ear or some other sense.

3. 3

   Offensive to one's sensibilities or morality.

   He played an ugly trick on us.

   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. 4

   Ill-natured; crossgrained; quarrelsome.

   an ugly temper; to feel ugly

5. 5

   figurativeUnpleasant; 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.

noun

1. 1

   slangUgliness.

   I want your ugly / I want your disease.

2. 2

   slangAn ugly person or thing.

3. 3

   informalAny product whose size and shape prevents it from fitting neatly on a pallet.

   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.

   Non-standard products (abnormal or 'uglies'): many distribution operations are designed to cater for standard palletized products.

4. 4

   datedA shade for the face, projecting from a bonnet.

   […] camp-stools, telescopes, poetry-books, blue uglies, red petticoats, and parasols of every hue.

verb

1. 1

   To make ugly (sometimes with up).

   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.

   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.

   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.

Forms

plural

uglies

comparative

uglier

superlative

ugliest

past tense

uglied

past participle

uglied

present participle

uglying

third person singular

uglies