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Cast not a jaundiced eye on the word jaundiced—and by that we mean this: don’t dislike or distrust jaundiced because of past experiences with the word or with others like it. Jaundiced is handy for describing the grumps among us who tend toward envy, aversion, or hostility, and who doesn’t know a few of those? This useful 17th century adjective comes from an also-useful 14th century noun jaundice that still refers to a medical condition in which excess bile pigments in the bloodstream and body tissues cause a person’s skin to turn yellow. The connection between the physical condition and the bad attitude lies in the physiological theory of the bodily humors, which holds that a hostile, irritable temperament is caused by excess yellow bile in one’s body.
Examples of jaundiced in a Sentence
Daniel Libit, Sportico.com, 3 Mar. 2026
Authors from Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford to Edward St. Aubyn have portrayed the ruling classes with the jaundiced eye of a skeptical insider.
—Rebecca Mead, New Yorker, 8 Dec. 2025
Mean-spiritedness lies in the eye of the beholder: one person’s aggressively sour-minded movie is another’s idea of delightfully jaundiced fun, and no movie this year proves that as aptly as Josh Safdie’s two-and-a-half-hour loop-de-loop character study Marty Supreme.
—Stephanie Zacharek, Time, 1 Dec. 2025
Taken on its own, however, Boyle and Garland’s trip back to this hellscape makes the most of casting a jaundiced, bloodshot eye at our current moment.
—David Fear, Rolling Stone, 18 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for jaundiced
Cite this Entry
“Jaundiced.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jaundiced. Accessed 14 Mar. 2026.
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jaundiced
adjective
