Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use ungrammatical in a sentence

10 example sentences · adjective

Ungrammatical means in violation of one or more of the rules and conventions of a language as defined by the grammar, resulting in unacceptable or incorrect usage. Example: “My Greek is not the tongue of Homer or Aeschylus but a sloppy ungrammatical sabir lacking Attic salt and tending to a saccharinity which sets my teeth on edge.”

Examples of ungrammatical by meaning

adjectiveIn violation of one or more of the rules and conventions of a language as defined by the grammar, resulting in...

  • My Greek is not the tongue of Homer or Aeschylus but a sloppy ungrammatical sabir lacking Attic salt and tending to a saccharinity which sets my teeth on edge.1985, Anthony Burgess, Kingdom of the Wicked
  • That comment seemed to anger Ingraham, who called James’ view a “barely intelligible, not to mention ungrammatical take on President Trump.”2018 February 17, Devan Cole, “LeBron James: ‘I am more than an athlete’”, in CNN
  • While adopting the pronoun as a nonbinary description is vastly preferable for some, Merriam-Webster says, there has also been some debate that it is ungrammatical.2019 September 17, Kendall Trammell, “Merriam-Webster adds the nonbinary pronoun ‘they’ to its dictionary”, in CNN

More sentences with ungrammatical

  • There are speakers for whom examples like (3a) sound very unnatural (while not totally ungrammatical).2021, Mikhail Knyazev, “Inter-Speaker Variation and Construction-Specific Restrictions on Indexical Shift in Poshkart Chuvash”, in Julia…. From the entry monstrous agreement
  • BAP has produced an ungrammatical and meandering but refreshingly brief “exhortation” (as he terms it) that reveals a widely read mind.2023 September 23, John Gray, “Bronze Age Pervert will not save the American right”, in The New Statesman, archived from the original on…. From the entry bap
  • Under Bever's proposed approach, only those unacceptable sentences whose badness cannot be explained by any plausible extragrammatical aspect of speech behavior are ungrammatical.1996, Carson T. Schütze, The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology, Chicago, I.L.: The…. From the entry extragrammatical
  • If “grammatical” means “generated by the grammar in normal situations,” then such sentences are clearly ungrammatical because we can’t generate such sentences in normal language usage.2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Preliminaries: Components of Language Structure” (chapter 2), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press…. From the entry definitional
  • In modern English it counts as a single word, namely, as a preposition, as in the prepositional phrase notwithstanding his request (compare the ungrammatical withstanding his request).2015, John R. Taylor, The Oxford Handbook of the Word, OUP Oxford, →ISBN, page 173. From the entry univerbation
  • Combining two ergatives in one clause is not always ungrammatical in Agul; but one of the ergatives must be used in a non-agentive function, e.g. instrumental or temporal.2012, Michael A. Daniel, Timur A. Maisak, Solmaz R. Merdanova, “Causatives in Agul”, in Pirkko Suihkonen, Bernard Comrie, Valery D.…. From the entry ergative
  • First, to avoid the cumbrous ‘he or she’ and ‘his or hers’, and the ungrammatical ‘they’ when used in the singular, I have mostly stuck to saying ‘he’ or ‘his’.[2010, Tom Bingham, Baron Bingham of Cornhill, The Rule of Law, Penguin Books, →ISBN, Preface, page ix. From the entry he

Meaning of ungrammatical

  1. adjective In violation of one or more of the rules and conventions of a language as defined by the grammar, resulting in unacceptable or incorrect usage.

Full definition of ungrammatical

Questions about ungrammatical in a sentence

How do you use ungrammatical in a sentence?
Ungrammatical is used as an adjective. For example: “My Greek is not the tongue of Homer or Aeschylus but a sloppy ungrammatical sabir lacking Attic salt and tending to a saccharinity which sets my teeth on edge.”
What is a short sentence with ungrammatical?
“There are speakers for whom examples like (3a) sound very unnatural (while not totally ungrammatical).”
What does ungrammatical mean?
Ungrammatical means in violation of one or more of the rules and conventions of a language as defined by the grammar, resulting in unacceptable or incorrect usage.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ungrammatical (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this page: “How to use ungrammatical in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/ungrammatical. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.