Definitions
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective (Grammar) not grammatical; ungrammatical; not conforming to the rules of grammar or accepted usage. Opposite of
grammatical .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective not grammatical; not conforming to the rules of grammar or accepted usage
Etymologies
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Examples
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As a result, the man is not assigned case in (1b), breaking the Case Filter and resulting in an ill-formed sentence.
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Doctorow's characters—including the former slaves Pearl and Coalhouse Walker, a white Southern lady named Emily, and an intriguing Union doctor, Wrede Sartorius—allow the author to imagine the Civil War as a blood-stained clash out of which an ugly, ill-formed modernity emerged.
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I was born with ill-formed hip sockets and had to wear braces on my legs until I was one and a half.
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Like goofy, though, I view the question of whether a given word or construction is “logical” to be ill-formed.
Singular “they” and the many reasons why it’s correct « Motivated Grammar 2009
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I was born with ill-formed hip sockets and had to wear braces on my legs until I was one and a half.
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The idea so vague and ill-formed it might just vanish like smoke in a breeze.
Antonio Garcia-Martinez: Pseudorandomness, Or How I Got Into Y Combinator and Had a Child With a Woman I Barely Knew, Almost Simultaneously Antonio Garcia-Martinez 2010
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It's the attitudes toward the covers and the fiction, usually unread, that need to be both borne (because people are entitled to their opinions no matter how ill-formed,) and repudiated (when they have an ill-formed opinion, educate them about what you feel to be excellent material, don't join in with trashing one part of SFF, like cover treatments, just to try to promote another part.)
[Guest Post] Part 1: A Manifesto of Imaginative Literature by Justin Allen 2010
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Plot, setting, characters major and minor—all come to life in his mouth because a short, ill-formed man had conceived, all of five minutes ago, the stunning notion of making a movie about mud wrestlers, carny hands, tragic but virtuous nightclub singers, doomed gangsters, sleazy Europeans.
Movie Conference, 1963 jake fuchs 2011
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A disjointed story with ill-formed characters and pointless tangents.
“Ponyo” is a first-rate kids’ flick from animé master » Scene-Stealers 2009
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I was born with ill-formed hip sockets and had to wear braces on my legs until I was one and a half.
Walk, don’t run! 2009
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