Word.ws English Dictionary

submarginal

submarginal adjective: less than, or worse than, marginal. Not meeting even the minimum standard of quality.

Adjective

submarginal (comparative more submarginal, superlative most submarginal)

  1. Less than, or worse than, marginal. Not meeting even the minimum standard of quality.
    • Nutpicking, along with chicken cleaning and rag sorting, constituted the very bottom of the submarginal industries in St. Louis in the 1930s, and it was in these industries that African American women found sporadic employment.1996, Staughton Lynd, "We are All Leaders": The Alternative Unionism of the Early 1930s
  2. Below a margin.

Forms of submarginal

comparativemore submarginal
superlativemost submarginal

Origin of submarginal

From sub- + marginal.

Words formed from submarginal

Questions about submarginal

What does submarginal mean?
Submarginal means less than, or worse than, marginal. Not meeting even the minimum standard of quality.
What part of speech is submarginal?
Submarginal is an adjective.

Words near submarginal in the dictionary

  1. submanifolds
  2. submanubrial
  3. submap
  4. submaps
  5. submargin
  6. submarginal
  7. submarginally
  8. submarginate
  9. submarginated
  10. submargins
  11. submaria

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: submarginal (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: “submarginal.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/submarginal. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.