Word.ws English Dictionary

ill-defined

ill-defined adjective: poorly defined; blurry, out of focus; lacking a clear boundary.

Adjective

ill-defined (comparative more ill-defined, superlative most ill-defined)

  1. Poorly defined; blurry, out of focus; lacking a clear boundary.
    • An ill-defined dislike, a little like jealousy, arose in Henrietta's mind; a little, however, mitigated by observing that the gentleman instantly caught sight of herself; and that, when not absolutely forced to look at his companion, he looked towards her.1837, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], Ethel Churchill: Or, The Two Brides. […], volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […], →OCLC, pages 45–46
    • Are you sick, or ill-defined? / Are you lost, or are you just difficult to come by?2020, Myles McCabe, “Stellar Abattoir”, in Triceratops, performed by ME REX
    Synonyms:
    fuzzy
  2. Defined in an inconsistent way.

ill-defined meaning in Malayalam

ill-defined in Malayalam

indistinct, vague, unclear
വ്യക്തമായി നിർവചിക്കപ്പെട്ടിട്ടില്ലാത്ത, അനിർണ്ണീതമായ, അലക്ഷണ, വേർതിരിച്ചറിയാൻ കഴിയാത്ത, സന്ദിഗ്ദ്ധാവസ്ഥയിലുള്ള, അവ്യക്തമായ

Synonyms of ill-defined

Antonyms

Forms of ill-defined

comparativemore ill-defined
superlativemost ill-defined

Origin of ill-defined

From ill + defined.

Words formed from ill-defined

Questions about ill-defined

What does ill-defined mean?
Ill-defined means poorly defined; blurry, out of focus; lacking a clear boundary.
What is ill-defined in Malayalam?
Ill-defined in Malayalam is വ്യക്തമായി നിർവചിക്കപ്പെട്ടിട്ടില്ലാത്ത, അനിർണ്ണീതമായ, അലക്ഷണ. See Ill-defined meaning in Malayalam.
What part of speech is ill-defined?
Ill-defined is an adjective.

Words near ill-defined in the dictionary

  1. ill-concealed
  2. ill-conceived
  3. ill-conditioned
  4. ill-considered
  5. ill-constructed
  6. ill-defined
  7. ill-definedness
  8. ill-deserved
  9. ill-directed
  10. ill-disguised
  11. ill-disposed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ill-defined (page history and authors); ill-defined (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ill-defined.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ill-defined. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.