Ungiving

adj

adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Not giving; ungenerous.

    "And yet it was clear, even as he was nearly drowning there in the North Atlantic, that in the other place there would be no objects whatsoever: that this miserable orange flotation device through which he’d stuck his arm, this fundamentally inscrutable and ungiving fabric-clad hunk of foam, would be a GOD in the objectless world of death toward which he was headed, would be the SUPREME I-AM-WHAT-I-AM in that universe of unbeing."

Example

More examples

"And yet it was clear, even as he was nearly drowning there in the North Atlantic, that in the other place there would be no objects whatsoever: that this miserable orange flotation device through which he’d stuck his arm, this fundamentally inscrutable and ungiving fabric-clad hunk of foam, would be a GOD in the objectless world of death toward which he was headed, would be the SUPREME I-AM-WHAT-I-AM in that universe of unbeing."

Etymology

From un- + giving.

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