Definitions

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

  • adjective so badly formed or out of shape as to be ugly.

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

  • adjective so badly formed or out of shape as to be ugly

Etymologies

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Examples

  • As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.

    Todd Kashdan: What You Don't Know About Creating a Happy, Meaningful Life 2009

  • This is a result, no doubt, of the "deliberate ferocity" of their "bad sewing," as Linda Nochlin points out in one of the best essays in the show's accompanying catalog — but also because that bad sewing is of a piece with the innocuous terry cloth and cotton jersey Bourgeois often uses and with her figures 'bulgy, vaguely ill-shapen contours.

    Daring and Disturbing Schwartz, Sanford 2008

  • I noticed at the same time, that a singular change took place in the figure of the man, — as if it collapsed within his clothes, and they consequently became ill-shapen and ill-fitting.

    Hunted Down 2007

  • First of all I set me down at the very outskirts of the woodland, and raised me a bower there, rude and ill-shapen.

    The Water of the Wondrous Isles 2007

  • I noticed at the same time, that a singular change took place in the figure of the man, — as if it collapsed within his clothes, and they consequently became ill-shapen and ill-fitting.

    Hunted Down 2007

  • She found him seated in his accustomed chair with no book open before him, no pen ready in his hand, no ill-shapen notes of blotted music lying before him as was usual, none of those hospital accounts with which he was so precise and yet so unmethodical: he was doing nothing, thinking of nothing, looking at nothing; he was merely suffering.

    The Warden 2004

  • I am not at all sure that the majority of the human race have not been ugly, and even among those “lords of their kind,” the British, squat figures, ill-shapen nostrils, and dingy complexions are not startling exceptions.

    Adam Bede 2004

  • Thus art first makes rude and ill-shapen figures and afterwards perfects everything with its proper form; and it was for this that the statuary Polycletus said, Then our work is most difficult, when the clay comes to be fashioned by the fingers.

    Essays and Miscellanies 2004

  • Thus art first makes rude and ill-shapen figures and afterwards perfects everything with its proper form; and it was for this that the statuary Polycletus said, Then our work is most difficult, when the clay comes to be fashioned by the fingers.

    Symposiacs 2004

  • Anywho, the girls want to go to South Padre, and while I'm sure its full of drunken revelry and the like, I think we could find a place for cheaper and that wouldnt require me to fit my ill-shapen body into a swimsuit.

    happychelsea Diary Entry happychelsea 2003

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