Word.ws English Dictionary

wearish

UK/ˈwɪəɹɪʃ/

wearish adjective: tasteless, having a sickly flavour; insipid.

Adjective

wearish (comparative more wearish, superlative most wearish)

  1. (obsolete) Tasteless, having a sickly flavour; insipid.
  2. (dialectal, obsolete) Sickly, wizened, feeble.
    • Who was to weet a wretched wearish elfe, / With hollow eyes and rawbone cheekes forspent […].1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto V”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • Democritus, as he is described by Hippocrates and Laertius, was a little wearish old man, very melancholy by nature, averse from company in his latter days, and much given to solitariness […]., New York Review Books, 2001, p.16

Forms of wearish

comparativemore wearish
superlativemost wearish

Origin of wearish

From Middle English warssh, werisch, werische, werish, werissh, werssh, werysshe, of unknown origin; compare Modern English dialectal wairsh and Early Modern English wersh; perhaps related to Middle English wery (modern weary).

Words formed from wearish

Questions about wearish

What does wearish mean?
Wearish means tasteless, having a sickly flavour; insipid.
What part of speech is wearish?
Wearish is an adjective.
How do you pronounce wearish?
Wearish is pronounced /ˈwɪəɹɪʃ/ (UK).

Words near wearish in the dictionary

  1. wearing too many hats
  2. wearing up
  3. wearing yellow stockings
  4. wearingly
  5. wearings
  6. wearish
  7. wearishness
  8. wearisom
  9. wearisome
  10. wearisomely
  11. wearisomeness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wearish (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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