Word.ws English Dictionary

off-kilter

off-kilter adjective: askew.

Adjective

off-kilter (comparative more off-kilter, superlative most off-kilter)

  1. (idiomatic) Askew.
    • On second thought, she reconsidered, looking up into Murphy's eyes; maybe he was a little off-kilter. Just off-kilter enough to want her to live up to that ridiculous term he'd given her—or else.2014, Marie Ferrarella, Her Forever Cowboy, Harlequin, →ISBN, page 61
    • Up to this point, True Romance has the makings of a gritty, off-kilter, romance movie meets road movie. This strikingly changes, not in direction (because the film is a gritty, off-kilter, romance movie meets road movie) but in symbolism, semiotics […]2015, Adilifu Nama, Race on the QT: Blackness and the Films of Quentin Tarantino, University of Texas Press, →ISBN, page 26

Forms of off-kilter

comparativemore off-kilter
superlativemost off-kilter
alternative formoff kilter

Questions about off-kilter

What does off-kilter mean?
Off-kilter means askew.
What part of speech is off-kilter?
Off-kilter is an adjective.

Words near off-kilter in the dictionary

  1. off-ice
  2. off-island
  3. off-islander
  4. off-islanders
  5. off-key
  6. off-kilter
  7. off-label
  8. off-lease
  9. off-leash
  10. off-licence
  11. off-licences

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: off-kilter (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-off-kilter.ogg.

Cite this entry: “off-kilter.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/off-kilter. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.