Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Deserving of contempt; despicable.
  • adjective Obsolete Contemptuous.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Worthy of contempt; meriting scorn or disdain; despicable; mean: said of persons or things.
  • Not worthy of consideration; inconsiderable; paltry; worthless: generally used with a negative.
  • Held in contempt; despised; neglected.
  • Contemptuous: as, to have a contemptible opinion of one.
  • Synonyms Contemptible, Despicable, Paltry, Pitiful, abject, base, worthless, sorry, low. Contemptible is unworthy of notice, deserving of scorn, for littleness or meanness; it is generally not so strong as despicable, which always involves the idea of great baseness: as, a contemptible trick; despicable treachery. Paltry and pitiful are applied to things which from their insignificance hardly deserve to be considered at all: as, a paltry excuse; a sum of money pitifully small. In pitiful, the pity seems to apply to the one foolish enough to offer, etc., the pitiful tiling. Pitiful is often applied to persons. What is paltry is of no consequence; what is pitiful is absurdly unequal to what it should be. See pitiful.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Worthy of contempt; deserving of scorn or disdain; mean; vile; despicable.
  • adjective Despised; scorned; neglected; abject.
  • adjective obsolete Insolent; scornful; contemptuous.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective deserving contempt

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective deserving of contempt or scorn

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