Word.ws English Dictionary

untender

untender adjective: not soft; harsh.

Adjective

untender (comparative more untender, superlative most untender)

  1. Not soft; harsh.
  2. Lacking sympathy, heartless, not empathetic.
    • Cordelia: Good my lord, / You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me: I / Return those duties back as are right fit, / Obey you, love you, and most honour you. / Why have my sisters husbands if they say / They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed, / That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry /...c. 1603–1606, William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of King Lear”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount...
    • I had not been ungenerous on the whole, / Nor yet untender;1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh, Fourth Book

Examples of untender in a sentence

  • He was the first-born of his mother, but in nowise like her—she being the ugliest, stupidest, and most untender of feline animals.1858 May 29, “Our Lost Pet”, in William Chambers, Robert Chambers, editors, Chamber's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, page...
  • She would let me know in a most untender manner if Brother Fielding told her I wasn't proficient.2006, James E. McNabney, Born in Brotherhood, page 22:

Forms of untender

comparativemore untender
superlativemost untender

Origin of untender

From un- + tender.

Words formed from untender

Questions about untender

What does untender mean?
Untender means not soft; harsh.
How do you use untender in a sentence?
He was the first-born of his mother, but in nowise like her—she being the ugliest, stupidest, and most untender of feline animals.
What part of speech is untender?
Untender is an adjective.

Words near untender in the dictionary

  1. untenanting
  2. untenants
  3. untended
  4. untendedness
  5. untendentious
  6. untender
  7. untenderable
  8. untendered
  9. untenderized
  10. untenderly
  11. untenderness

Source and license

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