Mean-spirited

adj

adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Having a base, nasty, petty, or malevolent disposition; tawdry.

    "My old acquaintances would sneer at me as a mean-spirited cur, whose best exploit was to get in jail."

Example

More examples

"Worse still was the mean-spirited stuff that it was OK for my friends to know about, but the thought of anyone else knowing about it made me itch with shame."

More for "mean-spirited"

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.