ill-bred

[il-bred]

adjective

1. showing lack of good social breeding; unmannerly; rude.

ill-bred

adjective

1. badly brought up; lacking good manners

Other Word Forms

• ill-breeding noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of ill-bred¹

First recorded in 1615–25

Example Sentences

To the victory party, apparently, go the ill-bred.

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She stooped to pick them up, and as she handed them to me I saw a little smile of scorn upon her lips, and I guessed at once she considered me ill-bred.

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But when her children would go out of their own court she called out, “I would have you stay away from ill-bred children!”

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“The People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred,” Whitman acknowledged, but not without the faith that the “miracle” of original identity, the “luminousness of real vision,” is within everyone’s grasp.

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An ill-bred falcon, who was subject to the vice of screaming, stood hooded and motionless on a perch like a parrot’s, brooding in some ancestral nightmare.

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Related Words

• filthy 
• immoral 
• improper 
• lewd 
• obscene 
• off-color 
• outrageous 
• ridiculous 
• salacious 
• shocking 
• tasteless 
• unbecoming 
• unseemly 
• vile