Word.ws English Dictionary

ugly

Syllables: ug·ly/ˈʌɡli/

ugly adjective: displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing.

Adjective

ugly (comparative uglier, superlative ugliest)

  1. Displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing.
    • the ugly view of his deformed crimes1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 48
    • O, I have passed a miserable night, / So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams.c. 1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Richard the Third: […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and...
  2. Displeasing to the ear or some other sense.
  3. Offensive to one's sensibilities or morality.
    • He played an ugly trick on us.
    • All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech. In the present connexion—or rather as a transition from the subject that started their conversation—such...1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC
    Synonyms:
    corrupt, immoral, vile
  4. (Southern US) Ill-natured; crossgrained; quarrelsome.
    • an ugly temper; to feel ugly
  5. (derogatory, figuratively) Unpleasant; disagreeable; likely to cause trouble or loss.
    • an ugly customer, wound or rumor
    • an ugly story that was being noised about in newsrooms across the nation

Noun

ugly (countable and uncountable, plural uglies)

  1. (slang, uncountable) Ugliness.
    • I want your ugly / I want your disease.2009, Lady Gaga, RedOne, Bad Romance
  2. (slang) An ugly person or thing.
  3. (informal, logistics) Any product whose size and shape prevents it from fitting neatly on a pallet.
    • These are firstly for products which need a cool room; secondly for products which can be stored on a standard pallet without overhang; and thirdly for products known as "the uglies" which always overhang a standard pallet.1983, Australian Transport, page 16
    • Non-standard products (abnormal or 'uglies'): many distribution operations are designed to cater for standard palletized products.2022, Alan Rushton, Phil Croucher, Peter Baker, The Handbook of Logistics and Distribution Management, page 591
  4. (UK, dated, informal) A shade for the face, projecting from a bonnet.
    • […] camp-stools, telescopes, poetry-books, blue uglies, red petticoats, and parasols of every hue.1857, Charles Kingsley, “(please specify the page)”, in Two Years Ago, volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC

Verb

ugly (third-person singular simple present uglies, present participle uglying, simple past and past participle uglied)

  1. (nonstandard, transitive) To make ugly (sometimes with up).
    • I move noiselessly, eat my food carefully without uglying the dining table with its remnants, fold my bedsheets in neat rectangles and place them on the bed in perfect symmetry.2011, P. A. Krishnan, Muddy River
    • There is time when the absence of either integrity or humility has uglied the face of the church before the world and turned Christianity into just another cocoon of condemnation and hypocrisy.2012, Najib George Awad, And Freedom Became a Public-square, page 197

ugly meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Urdu

ugly in Hindi

displeasing to the eye; not aesthetically pleasing
असुंदर asundar, कुरूप kurūp, बदसूरत badsūrat

ugly in Tamil

அசிங்கம், கோரமான, அவலட்சணமான

ugly in Marathi

ugly, unbeautiful
असुंदर asundar
ugly
कुरूप kurūp
ugly, awful, hideous
हिडीस hiḍīs

ugly in Urdu

displeasing to the eye; not aesthetically pleasing
بدسورت badsūrat
More languagesFewer languages
ugly in Bengali
বিশ্রী bisri
ugly in Telugu
కురూపి kurūpi, అందహీనము andahīnamu, వికారము vikāramu
ugly in Malayalam
വികൃത
ugly in Kannada
ಅಂದವಿಲ್ಲದ, ಕೆಟ್ಟ, ಹೇವರಿಕೆಯ, ಕುತ್ತದ
ugly in Punjabi
کوجھا kojhā, ਭੈੜਾ bhaiṛā, بسورا basūrā, بھیڑا bhaeṛā
ugly in Gujarati
કદરૂપું
ugly in Odia
କୁ ku, ଅସୁନ୍ଦର asundara
ugly in Sanskrit
अश्रीर aśrīra
ugly in Nepali
नराम्रो narāmro, कुरूप kurūp
ugly in Arabic
قَبِيح qabīḥ, بَشِع bašiʕ
ugly in Malay
hodoh, buruk, odoh
ugly in Indonesian
odoh, buruk, jelek
ugly in Persian
زشت zešt, بیریخت bi-rixt, بدقیافه bad-qiyâfe
ugly in Thai
น่าเกลียด nâa-glìiat
ugly in Vietnamese
xấu, xấu xí
ugly in Myanmar
အကျည်းတန် a.kyany:tan

Examples of ugly in a sentence

  • With all this competition, expect things to get ugly.
  • He would take great pleasure in uglying her up a little before killing her.2014, Jonathan Crocker, A Dream of Hope and Sorrow:

All 40 example sentences with ugly

Synonyms of ugly

13 more synonymsFewer synonyms

Antonyms

1 more antonymsFewer antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of ugly

Forms of ugly

Adjective
comparativeuglier
superlativeugliest
alternative form (obsolete)ougly
Noun
pluraluglies
Verb
third-person singular presentuglies
present participleuglying
past participleuglied
pastuglied

Origin of ugly

Inherited from Middle English ugly, uggely, uglike, borrowed from Old Norse uggligr (“fearful, dreadful, horrible in appearance”), from uggr (“fear, apprehension, dread”) (possibly related to agg (“strife, hate”)), equivalent to ug + -ly. Cognate with Scots ugly, uglie, Icelandic ugglegur. Meaning softened to "very unpleasant to look at" around the late 14th century, and sense of "morally offensive" attested from around 1300. For the meaning development compare Bulgarian грозен (grozen) (< Proto-Slavic *grozьnъ), Russian стра́шный (strášnyj) (< Proto-Slavic *strašьnъ < *straxъ); Latin foedus (< Proto-Indo-European *bʰeyh₂-).

Words formed from ugly

Phrases with ugly

15 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with ugly

Questions about ugly

What does ugly mean?
Ugly means displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing.
What is ugly in Hindi?
Ugly in Hindi is असुंदर (asundar), कुरूप (kurūp), बदसूरत (badsūrat). See Ugly meaning in Hindi.
How do you use ugly in a sentence?
With all this competition, expect things to get ugly.
What part of speech is ugly?
Ugly can be an adjective, a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce ugly?
Ugly is pronounced /ˈʌɡli/.

Words near ugly in the dictionary

  1. ugliness
  2. uglinesses
  3. uglis
  4. Uglish
  5. uglisome
  6. ugly
  7. Ugly American
  8. Ugly Americans
  9. ugly as bull-beef
  10. ugly as sin
  11. ugly cried

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ugly (page history and authors); ugly (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); असुंदर (Marathi) (page history and authors); అందహీనము (Telugu) (page history and authors); ugly (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); ugly (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors); بسورا (Punjabi) (page history and authors); ugly (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); ଅସୁନ୍ଦର (Odia) (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-uk-ugly.ogg, En-us-ugly.ogg.

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