Ugly

//ˈʌɡli// adj, noun, verb, slang

adj, noun, verb, slang ·Very common ·Middle school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Ugliness. slang, uncountable

    "I want your ugly / I want your disease."

  2. 2
    An ugly person or thing. countable, slang, uncountable
  3. 3
    Any product whose size and shape prevents it from fitting neatly on a pallet. countable, informal, uncountable

    "These are firstly for products which need a cool room; secondly for products which can be stored on a standard pallet without overhang; and thirdly for products known as "the uglies" which always overhang a standard pallet."

  4. 4
    A shade for the face, projecting from a bonnet. UK, countable, dated, informal, uncountable

    "[…] camp-stools, telescopes, poetry-books, blue uglies, red petticoats, and parasols of every hue."

Verb
  1. 1
    To make ugly (sometimes with up). nonstandard, transitive

    "I move noiselessly, eat my food carefully without uglying the dining table with its remnants, fold my bedsheets in neat rectangles and place them on the bed in perfect symmetry."

Adjective
  1. 1
    Displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing.

    "the ugly view of his deformed crimes"

  2. 2
    Displeasing to the ear or some other sense.
  3. 3
    Offensive to one's sensibilities or morality.

    "He played an ugly trick on us."

  4. 4
    Ill-natured; crossgrained; quarrelsome. Southern-US

    "an ugly temper; to feel ugly"

  5. 5
    Unpleasant; disagreeable; likely to cause trouble or loss. derogatory, figuratively

    "an ugly rumour; an ugly customer; an ugly wound"

Adjective
  1. 1
    provoking horror wordnet
  2. 2
    displeasing to the senses wordnet
  3. 3
    morally reprehensible wordnet
  4. 4
    inclined to anger or bad feelings with overtones of menace wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
unsightlycorruptdespicabledisfigureddispleasinghideous

Example

More examples

"The big ugly tree destroys the beauty of the house."

Etymology

Inherited from Middle English ugly, uggely, uglike, borrowed from Old Norse uggligr (“fearful, dreadful, horrible in appearance”), from uggr (“fear, apprehension, dread”) (possibly related to agg (“strife, hate”)), equivalent to ug + -ly. Cognate with Scots ugly, uglie, Icelandic ugglegur. Meaning softened to "very unpleasant to look at" around the late 14th century, and sense of "morally offensive" attested from around 1300. For the meaning development compare Bulgarian грозен (grozen) (< Proto-Slavic *grozьnъ), Russian стра́шный (strášnyj) (< Proto-Slavic *strašьnъ < *straxъ); Latin foedus (< Proto-Indo-European *bʰeyh₂-).

Related phrases

Hollywood uglybeat with the ugly stickbig and ugly enoughbig enough and ugly enoughbig ugly dishbutt uglybutt-uglycoyote uglyfall out of the ugly tree and hit every branchplug-uglypug-uglyrear one's ugly head

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