Word.ws English Dictionary

ill-received

ill-received adjective: poorly received; not enjoying the positive reception expected.

Adjective

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

  1. Poorly received; not enjoying the positive reception expected.
    • The Human Stain tells the tale of Coleman Silk, a classics tutor at a fictional Massachusetts college, whose life spirals into chaos after he makes an ill-received remark judged by some as a racial slur.2012, “Author Roth rebukes Wikipedia over Human Stain edit”, in BBC News, BBC
    • Being one day ill-received, he left off his visits: Rousseau met him afterwards in the street, and asked him why he did not come.1843, J. Russell, The Causes of the French Revolution, A. & R. Spottiswoode, page 165

Forms of ill-received

comparativemore ill-received
superlativemost ill-received

Questions about ill-received

What does ill-received mean?
Ill-received means poorly received; not enjoying the positive reception expected.
What part of speech is ill-received?
Ill-received is an adjective.

Words near ill-received in the dictionary

  1. ill-placed
  2. ill-posed
  3. ill-prepared
  4. ill-proportioned
  5. ill-qualified
  6. ill-received
  7. ill-repute
  8. ill-scathe
  9. ill-scented
  10. ill-seen
  11. ill-sorted

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ill-received (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-received.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ill-received. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.