Word.ws English Dictionary

ill-fitting

ill-fitting adjective: poorly fitted.

Adjective

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

  1. Poorly fitted.
    • The amateur stood in the glare of the spot, his brown shoes mismatched to the blue, ill-fitting suit. He rolled his eyes nervously toward the balcony.1970, Wally Ferris, Across 110th, page 222
    • There was no First Class accommodation, and there were always strong draughts from their ill-fitting doors.2023 February 22, Howard Johnston, “Southern '313s': is the end now in sight?”, in RAIL, number 977, page 42
  2. Improperly matched; unsuitable.
    • It was as if, because of the very strangeness of my heritage and the worlds I straddled, I was from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts, like a platypus or some imaginary beast, confined to a fragile habitat, unsure of where I belonged.2020, Barack Obama, A Promised Land, Crown

Forms of ill-fitting

comparativemore ill-fitting
superlativemost ill-fitting
alternative formillfitting

Questions about ill-fitting

What does ill-fitting mean?
Ill-fitting means poorly fitted.
What part of speech is ill-fitting?
Ill-fitting is an adjective.

Words near ill-fitting in the dictionary

  1. ill-fatedness
  2. ill-favored
  3. ill-favoured
  4. ill-favouredness
  5. ill-fed
  6. ill-fitting
  7. ill-formed
  8. ill-formedness
  9. ill-fortune
  10. ill-fortunes
  11. ill-founded

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ill-fitting (page history and authors). 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-fitting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ill-fitting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.