Word.ws English Dictionary

ill-prepared

ill-prepared adjective: not well prepared. Not ready, or not in condition to do a task.

Adjective

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

  1. Not well prepared. Not ready, or not in condition to do a task.
    • He was ill-prepared for the exam. I'm not surprised he failed.
    • The colonists, many of them gentlemen ill-prepared to be settlers, achieved failure at almost everything they tried.2006, William M Kelso, Jamestown - The Buried Truth

Forms of ill-prepared

comparativemore ill-prepared
superlativemost ill-prepared

Origin of ill-prepared

From ill + prepared.

Questions about ill-prepared

What does ill-prepared mean?
Ill-prepared means not well prepared. Not ready, or not in condition to do a task.
What part of speech is ill-prepared?
Ill-prepared is an adjective.

Words near ill-prepared in the dictionary

  1. ill-naturedly
  2. ill-naturedness
  3. ill-omened
  4. ill-placed
  5. ill-posed
  6. ill-prepared
  7. ill-proportioned
  8. ill-qualified
  9. ill-received
  10. ill-repute
  11. ill-scathe

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ill-prepared (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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