Word.ws English Dictionary

plug-ugly

plug-ugly adjective: very ugly.

Adjective

plug-ugly (not comparable)

  1. (slang) Very ugly.
    Synonyms:
    butt-ugly

Noun

plug-ugly (plural plug-uglies)

  1. (slang) A violent thug; a goon.
    • The article was a highly-coloured and exaggerated account of the adventure of Roy Perkins, 'our experienced war correspondent' and it contained such purple passages as 'this hirsute bully of Enmore Gardens,' 'a compound guarded by barbed wire, plug-uglies, and bloodhounds,' and finally, 'I was...1929, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, When the World Screamed
  2. (slang) An ugly person.
    • Thus passed the last of the North Wales Narrow Gauge locomotives, and one of the few American-built locomotives to survive in Great Britain; the sadly cropped though once elegant Russell, and the unembellished yet useful Yankee plug-ugly.1941 October, C. Hamilton Ellis, Charles E. Lee, “The Welsh Highland Railway—III”, in Railway Magazine, page 435
  3. (US, historical) A member of an American nativist street gang that operated in the west side of Baltimore, Maryland, from 1854 to 1865.

Synonyms of plug-ugly

Forms of plug-ugly

pluralplug-uglies

Questions about plug-ugly

What does plug-ugly mean?
Plug-ugly means very ugly.
What part of speech is plug-ugly?
Plug-ugly can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near plug-ugly in the dictionary

  1. plug-and-pray
  2. plug-compatible
  3. plug-in
  4. plug-ins
  5. plug-uglies
  6. plug-ugly
  7. plugable
  8. plugback
  9. plugbacks
  10. plugboard
  11. plugboards

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: plug-ugly (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-plug-ugly.ogg.

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