Word.ws English Dictionary

unsettling

/ənˈsɛtəlɪŋ/

unsettling adjective: that makes one troubled or uneasy; disquieting or distressing. Also the present participle and gerund of unsettle.

Adjective

unsettling (comparative more unsettling, superlative most unsettling)

  1. That makes one troubled or uneasy; disquieting or distressing.
    • More unsettling was the origin story of the infamous tell-all book Princess in Love. Diana claimed to be outraged in 1994 when Daily Express journalist Anna Pasternak spilled the beans of her affair with former army officer James Hewitt[…]April 5 2022, Tina Brown, “How Princess Diana’s Dance With the Media Impacted William and Harry”, in Vanity Fair

Noun

unsettling (plural unsettlings)

  1. The weakening of some previously established system or norm.
    • A farmer in Hampshire was sorely distressed by the unsettling of his barn. However straightly over-night he laid his sheaves on the threshing-floor for the application of the morning's flail, when morning came, all was topsy-turvy, higgledy-piggledy, though the door remained locked, and there was...1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 305
    • But reconstructing theory has proved more problematic than feminists might have hoped, even as their efforts played an important if sometimes overlooked part in post-modern unsettlings of theories in the West.2013, Krishna Sen, Maila Stivens, Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, page 19

Also used as

unsettling is also the present participle and gerund of unsettle.

unsettling meaning in Urdu and Punjabi

unsettling in Urdu

غیر پریشان کن

unsettling in Punjabi

ਬੇਚੈਨ ਕਰਨ ਵਾਲਾ

Examples of unsettling in a sentence

  • The worry for Europe is that love may be just as unsettling as scorn.
  • More unsettling was the origin story of the infamous tell-all book Princess in Love.
  • Liminal spaces can be both comforting and discomforting, nostalgic and unsettling, intimate and unnatural.

All 24 example sentences with unsettling

Forms of unsettling

Adjective
comparativemore unsettling
superlativemost unsettling
Noun
pluralunsettlings

Words formed from unsettling

Questions about unsettling

What does unsettling mean?
Unsettling means that makes one troubled or uneasy; disquieting or distressing.
What is unsettling in Urdu?
Unsettling in Urdu is غیر پریشان کن. See Unsettling meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is unsettling?
Unsettling can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce unsettling?
Unsettling is pronounced /ənˈsɛtəlɪŋ/ (US).

Words near unsettling in the dictionary

  1. unsettlement
  2. unsettlements
  3. unsettler
  4. unsettlers
  5. unsettles
  6. unsettling
  7. unsettlingly
  8. unsettlingness
  9. unsettlings
  10. unseverable
  11. unsevere

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unsettling (page history and authors); unsettling (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); unsettling (Punjabi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-StalJosA-Unsettling.wav, LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-unsettling.wav.

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