unfriendly
Americanadjective
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not amicable; not friendly or kindly in disposition; unsympathetic; aloof.
an unfriendly coldness of manner.
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hostile; antagonistic.
an unfriendly act of aggression.
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unfavorable; inhospitable or inimical, as an environment.
an unfriendly climate for new ideas.
adverb
adjective
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not friendly; hostile
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unfavourable or disagreeable
adverb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of unfriendly
before 900; Middle English (adj.); Old English unfreondlīche (adv.). See un- 1, friendly
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Budapest's promise of pragmatic co-operation was worth absolutely nothing, he complained, adding that Hungary's "extremely unfriendly step constitutes an unprecedented and ungrounded escalation".
From BBC ● Sep. 8, 2026
UniCredit was branded by politicians as aggressive and unfriendly.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 8, 2026
One thing I can’t play is family unfriendly tunes.
From Salon ● Jun. 6, 2026
The ruling also suspends a Pentagon designation of Anthropic, creator of the Claude AI model, as a national security supply chain risk -- a label typically reserved for organizations from unfriendly foreign countries.
From Barron's ● Mar. 26, 2026
But the Company cared no longer for watchers or unfriendly eyes.
From "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien
The money piece never quite shook out on the avant-garde, and by the 1980s the lofts had mostly closed amid rising rents and unfriendlier civic attitudes toward semi-legal assembly.
From New York Times ● Mar. 17, 2022
Some of the less grateful passages had been censored by Medora's own hand and the unfriendlier of the critics thus partially disarmed in advance.
From Under the Skylights by Henry Blake Fuller
And the gallant Red Admiral, the brave beautiful Red Admiral that had dared unfriendlier gales, trimmed his painted sails to a wind that was the breath of spring.
From Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man by Marie Conway Oemler
The tale results in a flashback to a Dickensian-looking period when Sesame Street was known as “the unfriendliest street in town” and ancestors of all the current gang spent their days crabbing at one another.
From New York Times ● Nov. 23, 2016
She clasped a chain about the hound's neck, and they set off westward towards the house of Fergus Fionnliath, who was reputed to be the unfriendliest man in the world to a dog.
From Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens
He feels that he is engaged in single combat with Nature at her unfriendliest.
From And Even Now by Sir Max Beerbohm
I am in Italy—in Genoa, to be sure, which of all Italian cities passes for the unfriendliest to the Muse: but that is my probation.
From Sir John Constantine Memoirs of His Adventures At Home and Abroad and Particularly in the Island of Corsica: Beginning with the Year 1756 by Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
To find out that you are not so good or generous or magnanimous as you thought is, next to having other people find it out, probably the unfriendliest discovery that can be made.
From A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories by William Dean Howells
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