ungainly
adjective
Did you know?
What do you have to gain by knowing the root of ungainly? Plenty. The gain in ungainly is an obsolete English adjective meaning "direct" that is ultimately derived from the Old Norse preposition gegn, meaning "against." (It is unrelated to the noun in "economic gains" or the verb in "gain an advantage"; those came to English by way of Anglo-French and are related to an Old High German word meaning "to hunt for food.") Ungainly can describe someone who is clumsy, as in "a tall, ungainly man"; or something that causes you to feel clumsy when you try to handle it, as in "a car with ungainly controls"; or something that simply looks awkward and out of place, as in "an ungainly strip mall."
Synonyms
Examples of ungainly in a Sentence
Lizz Schumer, Peoplemag, 29 Mar. 2024
The other featured a duck squawking out the ungainly acronym that gave Aflac its name.
—Maria Aspan, Fortune, 26 Mar. 2024
And Farley was wild, crashing through tables, cramming himself into ungainly costumes, and going full red-faced dynamo mode all in pursuit of every last laugh in the building.
—Dennis Perkins, EW.com, 14 Dec. 2023
Minus Banville’s own knack for literary ventriloquism, however, this all too evidently European co-production can’t help but feel multiple degrees removed from the real thing, not helped by the shuffling, ungainly presence of a wildly miscast Liam Neeson in shoes once filled by Bogart and Mitchum.
—Guy Lodge, Variety, 24 Sep. 2022
Jim Nightingale/Newsday RM via Getty Images Of course, its tailfins were already dated, and its sloping front underside was awkward, while its generous ground clearance lent it an ungainly look.
—Larry Printz, Ars Technica, 4 Oct. 2023
The first show cannibalizes the second, resulting in an ungainly hybrid that is, if nothing else, still easily the year’s best broadcast procedural about a missing persons squad.
—Daniel Fienberg, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Oct. 2023
The play was no masterpiece, an ungainly sprawl with a cast of more than two dozen that, if not shortened by a director, ran three and a half hours.
—Adam Hochschild, Smithsonian Magazine, 26 Oct. 2023
And the company that Zaslav has ended up leading is an ungainly entity, stuck with colossal debts.
—Clare Malone, The New Yorker, 23 Aug. 2023
These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ungainly.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Dictionary Entries Near ungainly
Cite this Entry
“Ungainly.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ungainly. Accessed 18 Apr. 2024.
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