Word.ws English Dictionary

unlicked

unlicked adjective: newborn (of an animal), not yet licked into shape; (by extension, of a person) naïve, inexperienced, unrefined.

Adjective

unlicked (not comparable)

  1. Newborn (of an animal), not yet licked into shape; (by extension, of a person) naïve, inexperienced, unrefined.
    • Rachel was an unlicked girl, no doubt prolific of confidences, the very first of which would be: ‘You see, I don't get on with my father.’1915, Virginia Woolf, chapter I, in The Voyage Out, London: Duckworth & Co., […], →OCLC
  2. Crude, unpolished; not skilfully formed or finished.
    • [M]uch which I have heard objected to my late friend’s writings was well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you—a sort of unlicked, incondite things—villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases.1833, [Charles Lamb], “Preface. By a Friend of the Late Elia.”, in The Last Essays of Elia. […], London: Edward Moxon, […], →OCLC, page v
  3. Not licked (by the tongue).
  4. Unbeaten, undefeated.

Origin of unlicked

From un- + licked.

Questions about unlicked

What does unlicked mean?
Unlicked means newborn (of an animal), not yet licked into shape; (by extension, of a person) naïve, inexperienced, unrefined.
What part of speech is unlicked?
Unlicked is an adjective.

Words near unlicked in the dictionary

  1. unlicensing
  2. unlicentious
  3. unlichened
  4. unlichenized
  5. unlickable
  6. unlicked
  7. unlickerish
  8. unlid
  9. unlidded
  10. unlidding
  11. unlids

Source and license

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