Word.ws English Dictionary

ill-used

ill-used is the simple past and past participle of ill-use.

Meaning of ill-use

Verb

ill-use (third-person singular simple present ill-uses, present participle ill-using, simple past and past participle ill-used)

  1. To treat someone badly, cruelly or unkindly.
    • A Newcastle shunter, Goodchild, working at one end of Forth Goods Yard, was for some reason moved to the other end, with no loss of pay: he thought he was ill-used and ceased work, as did a number of sympathisers.1958 March, T. Preston, “North Eastern Memories”, in Railway Magazine, page 206

See all 2 meanings of ill-use

Adjective

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

  1. Having been treated badly.
    • I said so - I said so warmly, for I felt that the Professor was an ill-used man.1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

Forms of ill-used

comparativemore ill-used
superlativemost ill-used

Questions about ill-used

What does ill-used mean?
Ill-used means having been treated badly.
What is ill-used the simple past and past participle of?
Ill-used is the simple past and past participle of ill-use.
What part of speech is ill-used?
Ill-used is an adjective.

Words near ill-used in the dictionary

  1. ill-treatment
  2. ill-treats
  3. ill-usage
  4. ill-usages
  5. ill-use
  6. ill-used
  7. ill-uses
  8. ill-using
  9. ill-will
  10. ill-willed
  11. ill-willer

Source and license

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