Word.ws English Dictionary

mean-spirited

mean-spirited adjective: having a base, nasty, petty, or malevolent disposition; tawdry.

Adjective

mean-spirited (comparative more mean-spirited, superlative most mean-spirited)

  1. Having a base, nasty, petty, or malevolent disposition; tawdry.
    • My old acquaintances would sneer at me as a mean-spirited cur, whose best exploit was to get in jail.1877, Edward Payson Roe, chapter 15, in A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century
    Synonyms:
    tawdry

Synonyms of mean-spirited

Forms of mean-spirited

comparativemore mean-spirited
superlativemost mean-spirited
alternative formmean spirited
alternative formmeanspirited

Words formed from mean-spirited

Questions about mean-spirited

What does mean-spirited mean?
Mean-spirited means having a base, nasty, petty, or malevolent disposition; tawdry.
What part of speech is mean-spirited?
Mean-spirited is an adjective.

Words near mean-spirited in the dictionary

  1. mean-mouths
  2. mean-mug
  3. mean-mugged
  4. mean-mugging
  5. mean-mugs
  6. mean-spirited
  7. meanable
  8. meander
  9. Meander Valley
  10. meandered
  11. meanderer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mean-spirited (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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