Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Ungainly   /əngˈeɪnli/   Listen
Ungainly

adjective
1.
Lacking grace in movement or posture.  Synonyms: clumsy, clunky, gawky, unwieldy.  "Clumsy fingers" , "What an ungainly creature a giraffe is" , "Heaved his unwieldy figure out of his chair"
2.
Difficult to handle or manage especially because of shape.  Synonyms: awkward, bunglesome, clumsy.  "A load of bunglesome paraphernalia" , "Clumsy wooden shoes" , "The cello, a rather ungainly instrument for a girl"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Ungainly" Quotes from Famous Books



... wondered how that man could have had such a hold on our hearts. There was not a handsome feature in him. He had a large but uneven forehead. His eyes were small, grayish-blue and deepset. His nose was homely, his teeth were discolored, and he was ungainly and awkward. His best feature was his height, but he stooped in his shoulders, and his dress when about his work was of the plainest description. His baize jacket and slipshod shoes did not ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman

... hands of the woman at the cabin door were a miracle of grime and scrofula. Her sluttish locks, together with two children, hung around her; one of the latter chewing a muddy carrot up into the leaves, an ungainly little imp; the other was a girl of singularly beautiful features and of perfect form, her large luminous eyes of richest brown reflecting the sunlight from their depths like mirrors—a little angel ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... natural, lively, chattering boys, whom it would be a temptation to try and draw, are not really the most interesting. They tend to develop into bores of the first water in later life. But the boy who develops into a fine man is often ungainly, shy, awkward, silent in early life, acutely sensitive, and taking ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... back of his head, his elbow resting on the wooden box itself. He looked very young, she thought, in spite of his slightly haggard appearance. Something in his attitude reminded her of him as he had been in his Eton days—long-legged and ungainly in his short jacket. She smothered a little sigh. They had drifted such a weary way since then; too far to ever ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres

... had made one other friend at Bishopsgate Street—the dog of the monastery. It was a half-bred bloodhound, and nobody seemed to know whence he came and why he was there. He was a huge, ungainly, and most forbidding creature, and partly for that reason, but chiefly because it was against rule to fix the affections on earthly things, the brothers rarely caressed him. Unnoticed and unheeded, he slept in the house by day and prowled through the court ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine

... heads of the church could take refuge! Perhaps they shaved off all the hair from their bodies in sign of supereminent self-abasement, leaving themselves naked to the cuticle, that they might prove, by ocular evidence, what a poor ungainly set of wretches they really were, carnally considered; or perhaps they went on all-fours to heaven, in sign of their unfitness to enter into the presence of the pure of mind in an attitude more erect and confident. Well, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... shadow grew ungainly, the dyked path struck across a long wet field against the black soil of which the dozens of white-clad peons with their mattocks gleamed like grains of rice on an ebony surface. Beyond, it entered foothills, flanked a peak, and joined a wide road leading directly to an immense cluster of buildings ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... got a very good look at them in their cribs, but one day when they were old enough to be let out, I went up with Miss Laura to the yard where they were kept. Such queer, ungainly, large-boned creatures they were, and such a good time they were having, running and jumping ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders

... Presidency. He is now replaced, I think, by a Mr. Falkner. He is a tall, stout, gentlemanly man, but, while a perfect gentleman in his conversation, and having less of the American accent than most Americans, his manner is somewhat ungainly—perhaps owing to his make, which is large and a little inclining ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin

... against us; for a sailor looks half a dozen times to windward for once that he glances over the lee rail. And my efforts during the last hour have convinced me of the impossibility of driving this ungainly structure to windward by merely swimming. If I only had an oar, or a paddle of some sort, I might be able to do something; but then, you see, I haven't, so it is of no use to think further of that. The wind is dropping, which is a point in our ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... the distance at work with a huge buffalo, and exclaiming, "Hi-yah! belly good walkee now," rushed off in that direction. He soon returned with the buffalo and his owner, and indicated that we could cross on the back of the former. The huge, ungainly beast threw up his head and snorted when he caught sight of the "fanquis," or foreign devils, but a pull at the ring through his nose soon ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... the tempestuous darkness. They advanced with difficulty, side by side, speaking low. Rough customers to deal with. Their faces were emaciated from excessive drinking: their eyes gleamed, their voices were hoarse: a brutal pair! But their movements were souple and lively: they walked with that ungainly swagger affected by the light-fingered gentry and the criminals ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... to where a party of tourists, obviously American, waited. The boys watched as the animal came to a halt. The driver bowed to the party. Then, taking a thin stick, he tapped the camel on bony knees that were wrapped in worn burlap. Instantly the camel let out a heartrending groan. Its ungainly legs folded like a poorly designed beach chair, and moaning in ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... and many a sailor. It would seem unlikely that any living thing should seek rest in such a place, or find it. Nevertheless, frail and delicate flowers bloom there, flowers of both the land and the sea; heavy, ungainly seals disport in the swelling waves, and find grateful retreats back in the inmost bores of its storm-lashed caverns; while in many a chink and hollow of the highest crags, not visible from beneath, a great variety of waterfowl make homes ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... but wont to steal O'er the lyre in gentle mood. From the sparkling waterfalls, From the brook that purling calls, Shall Silenus' loathsome beast Be allow'd at will to feast? Aganippe's * wave he sips With profane and spreading lips,— With ungainly feet stamps madly, Till the waters ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... Bright red were those lobsters, and fine-looking fellows, every one of them, in spite of Mrs. Lee's poor opinion; but they were a little too well dressed, even for a dinner-party. Their thick shoulders were adorned with collars of the daintiest material and finish, while every ungainly "flipper" wore a "cuff" which had been manufactured for very different uses. Plenty of cuffs and collars, and queer enough the lobsters looked in them. All the queerer because every item of lace and linen was variegated with huge black ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various

... You hold you dead and dumb, Or scorn my beckoning, And will not come; And I say, "'Twere mood ungainly To store her memory so:" I say it vainly ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy

... score of years. Nor did the negotiations appear altogether hopeless. The suitor was, indeed, we have seen, as insignificant in body as he was contemptible in intellectual ability. Moreover, the deep traces left on his face by the small-pox rendered him sufficiently ungainly. The blemish was said to be increasing, instead of diminishing, with his years.[1331] But the French courtiers might perhaps have overcome this impediment had Elizabeth been able to see it to be her interest to contract ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... sail their new craft it stuck midway across the dam of Rutledge's mill at New Salem, a village of fifteen or twenty houses not many miles from their starting-point. With its bow high in air, and its stern under water, it looked like some ungainly fish trying to fly, or some bird making an unsuccessful attempt to swim. The voyagers appeared to have suffered irreparable shipwreck at the very outset of their venture, and men and women came down from their houses to offer advice or to make fun of the young boatmen as they waded about in ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay

... the Borinage coal field exceeds twenty million tons a year. Its ungainly features of shafts, chimneys, and mounds of debris are relieved in places by woodlands, an appearance of a hilly country is presented where the pit mounds have been planted with fir trees. Apart from its mining aspect, Mons is a city of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... regarded generally as an ungainly man, and so he was; and yet on occasions he appeared to me to be superior in dignity and nobility to almost any other man whom I have ever seen. I was present when the committee from the National Convention, that gave his first nomination for ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom

... favor his audience were, yet he showed not the slightest embarrassment; this, and his noble, dignified mien, agreeably surprised those who expected from what they had been told to behold an awkward man with an ungainly figure. A murmur of approbation ran through the hall on his appearance; and electrified by this welcome, he gained all hearts from the first act. His movements were full of grace and dignity; he had ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... opened swiftly, and he saw mine host before him, eyeing him with those bad eyes; of too much girth, you might have said, to be nimble, yet somehow suggesting to the swift intuition of youth, as Rodriguez looked at him standing upon his door-step, the spirit and shape of a spider, who despite her ungainly build is ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany

... I should think,' replies Lippa, who is watching the ungainly not to say peculiar movements, of a stout elderly female who ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton

... hasn't anything like that!" laughed Ned. "That was only Harry's crazy notion after he saw something big and ungainly careening about the enclosed yard of Shop Thirteen. Hello, there go Mary Nestor and her father!" and Ned pointed to the opposite side of the street where the girl and Mr. Nestor could be seen in the light of a ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton

... called a leather tongue. At the back of the boot is a small strap, which is used to fasten the ski heel-strap securely to the boot. Once fixed on the ski, the foot is so secure no fall can loosen it, and the only way to extricate the foot is to undo the three straps. Outside these huge ungainly hair stockings and strangely comfortable boots very thick gaiters are worn. It is very necessary to keep the feet and legs warm in such a cold land as Norway, where the mercury freezes oft-times in the thermometers, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... from the shoulders. In the latter case a corset becomes useless, the body is left free and unconfined for respiration and motion, there is more health, and consequently more beauty. Indeed all the most ungainly and uncomfortable articles of dress that fashion has ever in her folly prescribed, not the tight corset merely, but the farthingale, the vertugadin, the hoop, the crinoline, and that modern monstrosity the so-called 'dress improver' also, all of them have owed their origin to the same error, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde

... man, somewhat ungainly of figure and homely of face. But his large, deep eyes of velvety nut-brown were very beautiful and marvellously bright and clear for a man of his age. He wore a little pointed, well-cared-for beard, innocent of gray; but his hair was grizzled, and altogether ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... in the Quadrilateral, it appears; passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment. There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... evenings of every week, the leaders of this party met in the saloon of Madame Roland, to deliberate respecting their measures. Among them there was a young lawyer from the country, with a stupid expression of countenance, sallow complexion, and ungainly gestures, who had made himself excessively unpopular by the prosy speeches with which he was ever wearying the Assembly. He had often been floored by argument and coughed down by contempt, but he seemed alike insensible to sarcasm and ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott

... fact was, I meant to follow the policy of the Aberdeen government when starving to death one of the bravest armies that ever faced a foe. Instead of expanding plains and undulating hills, such as Smooth had pictures to his mind in his boyhood, I found the seat of war an ungainly mud-puddle, with ramparts of savage-looking citizens menacing each other from its opposite banks. Between these banks the amusement of war was every now and then kept up with doubtful results. That something more than ordinary was to pay I felt assumed by the grimaces of the contending ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... part of the town, where gaudily painted door jambs and window frames and wonderfully prosperous gardens proclaim the immigrant from sunny Italy. Not infrequently an old warehouse, store, or church is transformed into an ungainly and evil-odored barracks, housing scores of men who do their own washing and cooking. Those who do not dwell in the cities are at work in construction camps—for the Italian has succeeded the Irishman as the knight of the pick and shovel. The great bulk of these ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... Ungainly, awkward, repulsive-looking as these creatures are, with their great projecting harelips and their hairy humps, they have the compensation of being most priceless treasures to all those who "dwell in tents" in the vast sandy plains ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... only brother. Both were tall, good-looking young men, though there was not even a family resemblance between the grey-eyed and fairhaired David, with his smooth-shaven face and slender well-proportioned figure, and his loose-limbed, rather ungainly cousin, whose appearance of great strength made up for his lack of grace, and whose large melting brown eyes made one forget the faults which the hypercritical might have found in the rest of his face: the rather large nose, and the mouth which was ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce

... faint resemblance of one "every inch a priest." The very antipodes to the 'bonhomie' of this figure, confronted him as croupier at the foot of the table. This, as I afterwards learned, was no less a person than Mister Donovan, the coadjutor or "curate;" he was a tall, spare, ungainly looking man of about five and thirty, with a pale, ascetic countenance, the only readable expression of which vibrated between low suspicion and intense vulgarity: over his low, projecting forehead ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever

... halls Costigan stalked to a certain storage room, where with all due precaution he donned his own suit of Triplanetary armor. Making an ungainly bundle of the other Solarian equipment stored there, he dragged it along behind him as he clanked back toward his prison, until he neared the dock at which was moored the Nevian space-speedster which he was determined ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... every step, Inspector Weymouth ascended, ungainly, that frail and moving stair. Arrived beside me, he wiped the perspiration from his face ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... brutes stood with stiffly erected ears, then they poured from the grove toward the river's bank, covering the distance with great, ungainly leaps. ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... and with their lithe and apparently boneless shapes conformed to the rude and sharp angles, they are a wonderful, but not a graceful or pleasing sight. At a little distance they look like huge maggots, and their slow, ungainly motions upon the land do not lessen this resemblance. Swimming in the ocean, at a distance from the land, they are inconspicuous objects, as nothing but the head shows above water, and that only at intervals. But ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... shall pass his childhood and youth in the guise of a wild boar, only to be transformed into an Adonis at last by the hand of the woman who is disinterested enough to love him despite his formidable tusks and ungainly figure? ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... to be witty, but only succeed in being pert, are insufferable; and as for attempts to be comic they are disgraceful in women whether they succeed or fail. The comic is ungainly and exaggerated, and so is in some sort related to the sublime. The elephant is comic, the camel and the giraffe are comic, all overgrowth ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore

... clothes, too, were queer. He had on a dingy purple velvet jacket, covered with frayed gold lace, tawdry tinsel braid, tarnished gilt buttons, with long, wide red and white striped cotton trousers, from which his dusky ankles and bare flat feet flopped about like the fins of some great ungainly fish. ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur

... for members of the board of directors. But in the early days of the switchover, the idea of a board of directors smacked too strongly of the old system of corporate organization to suit the men. The solution had been simple, if a trifle ungainly. Everyone who owned stock in Robling Titanium was automatically a member of the board of directors, with Torkleson as chairman of the board. The stockholders numbered over ...
— Meeting of the Board • Alan Edward Nourse

... curtailed of its fair proportions; ill-made, ill- shaped, ill-proportioned; crooked &c (distorted) 243; hard featured, hard visaged; ill-favored, hard-favored, evil-favored; ill-looking; unprepossessing, unattractive, uninviting, unpleasing. graceless, inelegant; ungraceful, ungainly, uncouth, stiff; rugged, rough, gross, rude, awkward, clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish^; lumbering; hulky^, hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; grisly, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... highly, and laid on the effects with a liberal brush, while Burke was subtle, incisive and refined. Burton's features were strong and heavy, and his figure was portly and ungainly. Burke was lithe and graceful. His face was plain, but wonderfully expressive. The versatility of this rare actor was remarkable, his pathos being quite as striking a feature as his comedy. {HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} His dramatic effects sprung more from intuition ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke

... in full, but every instant she expected the revelation would take place, and with each separate movement of the phantasm her suspense became more and more intolerable. At last it stood on the floor of the cellar, a broad, ungainly, horribly ungainly figure, that glided up to and past her into the far cellar. There it halted, as nearly as she could judge on the new tiles, and remained standing. As she gazed at it, too fascinated to remove her eyes, there was a loud, reverberating crash, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... had just caught the figure of an exceptionally big and ungainly Selenite lying motionless among the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells

... with a writhe of his ungainly person, 'we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... family, as native to America as is Ashley's peculiar sense of beauty which you won't acknowledge. It is as ugly to look at, the plant is, all spines and thick, graceless, fleshy pads; as ugly as Ashley life looks to you. And this crabbed, ungainly plant-creature is faithfully, religiously tended all the year around by the wife of a farmer, because once a year, just once, it puts forth a wonderful exotic flower of extreme beauty. When the bud begins to show its color she sends out word to all her neighbors to be ready. And we are ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... to him no longer. He was now only anxious to part from the man and return with the news to Lady Chepstow, and was casting round in his mind for some excuse to avoid going indoors with him and wasting precious time in breaking bread and eating salt, when there lurched out of an adjoining doorway an ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese. The fellow had bent forward ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew

... down a flight of steps to the beach, and stumbled across the soft sand towards the sea. One or two boats were lying out in the surf—heavy Dutch fishing-boats, known technically as "pinks," flat-bottomed, round-prowed, keel less, heavy and ungainly vessels, but strong as wood and iron and workmanship could make them. Some seemed to be afloat, others bumped heavily and continuously; while a few lay stolidly on the ground with the waves breaking right over them ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... duke was an idiot. She was very much mistaken. If she had but broken up the ice, she would have found that the water below was not shallow. The duke, in fact, like many other Englishmen, though he did not like the trouble of showing forth, and had an ungainly manner, was a man who had read a good deal, possessed a sound head and an honourable mind, though he did not know what it was to love anybody, to care much for anything, and was at once perfectly sated and yet perfectly ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... parted the bushes and peeped through, he almost shouted in his excitement. He had reached the Big Pass. A broad river swept rapidly by, and along the banks wild carabao rolled and splashed, making queer diminutive sounds, not in keeping with their ungainly size. Piang was careful to keep out of sight, as they are apt to be dangerous when their very uncertain ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart

... ducking, Seized both his legs, and chucking Dobbs sideways, splash he went,— The wherry swayed, then righted, While I, somewhat excited, Over the water bent; Three times he rose, but vainly I clutched his form ungainly, He sank, while sighs and sobs Beneath the waves seemed muttered, And all the night-winds uttered In ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various

... to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... day members of this community are off fishing in deep water; but what they like best to do is to crawl up on the rocks and grunt and bellow, or go to sleep in the sun. Some of them lie half in water, their tails floating and their ungainly heads wagging. These uneasy ones are always wriggling out or plunging in. Some crawl to the tops of the rocks and lie like gunny bags stuffed with meal, or they repose on the broken surfaces like masses of jelly. When they are all at home the rocks have not room ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... more absurd than a ridden camel galloping away in the moonlight, with his neck stretched out in front of him and his four ungainly legs in the air all together, it is three more camels doing the same thing. They looked like a giant's washing blown off the line flapping before a high wind, and made hardly more noise. The whack-whack-whack of sticks on the beasts' rumps was as distinct ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy

... feathers is so comical as a crow baby, with its awkward bows and ungainly hops, its tottering steps on the fence and its mincing, tight-boot sort of gait on the ground, its eager fluttering when it has hopes of food, and its loud and ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller

... short in an improvised variation on the theme of Vulcan's song in "Philemon and Baucis" when he heard a subdued but none the less poignant cry of distress from Joan. In order to turn his head he was compelled to twist his ungainly body, and Joan, who was standing well away from her canvas, was aware of ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... ungainly Fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning— Little relevancy bore; For we can not help agreeing That no living human being Ever yet was blest with seeing Bird above his chamber door— Bird or ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... deacon. A soldier on the outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift, backhanded motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt amidst the crowd of carrion. The vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... Yes, a good fellow. But there now—he doesn't satisfy the mistress, she says his appearance is ungainly. And now they've gone and told tales about him for letting some peasants into the kitchen yesterday. It is a bad look-out: they may dismiss him. And he is a ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... him during the service, came to him, as he passed out, to give him greeting and a word of condolence. For that time only he passed them by, as if they had been wooden images. His spirit had been strained to its uttermost, and would bear no more. He made his way home with an ungainly, swift gait,—home to the dear bedside,—down upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... this, the negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus 'wieldy' (Chaucer) survives only in 'unwieldy'; 'couth' and 'couthly' (both in Spenser), only in 'uncouth' and 'uncouthly'; 'rule' (Foxe) only in 'unruly'; 'gainly' (Henry More) in 'ungainly'; these last two were both of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; 'gainly' is indeed still common in the West Riding of Yorkshire; 'exorable' (Holland) and 'evitable' only in 'inexorable' and 'inevitable'; 'faultless' remains, but hardly 'faultful' (Shakespeare). ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... round, so as to place her between his adversary and himself. As it proved, it was the very best thing that he could have done. The rough, half-blinded and maddened by the blows which he had received, struck out with all his ungainly strength, just as his partner's head swung round in front of him. There was a noise like that of a stone hitting a wall, a deep groan, her grasp relaxed, and she dropped a dead weight upon the pavement, while the Admiral ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle

... all references to their ungainly movement and doltish intellect, the Wild Goose, of which the White-fronted is one of the most interesting, is held in high estimation by the sportsman, and even he, if keen of observation, will learn from it many things that will ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various

... his resentment at having to profess a religion he did not believe, in this new discovery of the scholastic importance of clothing. He went along with an eye to all the shop windows that afforded a view of his person. Indisputably his trousers were ungainly, flapping abominably over his boots and bagging terribly at the knees, and his boots were not only worn and ugly but extremely ill blacked. His wrists projected offensively from his coat sleeves, he perceived a huge asymmetry in the collar of his jacket, ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... describe him when he was at the climax of his power, and he no longer possesses anything in common with his Russian counterpart, Professor Pobiedenotsoff, except in a singular peculiarity of appearance. Indeed, Hintzpeter's looks invite caricature. He is lanky, ungainly and lantern-jawed, and seems like a man who has never been young, and who has not yet obtained the venerability of old age. His manners are exceedingly ungracious, and even repellent, but when once he becomes interested in a discussion ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... limp and quiet as he led them through the wood, strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A pinafore, which Joan had worn at breakfast, was served to them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly for some seconds. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... the tapping, there came, instead, the sound of someone or something, scrambling on to the window-sill,—as if some creature, unable to reach the window from the ground, was endeavouring to gain the vantage of the sill. Some ungainly creature, unskilled in surmounting such an obstacle as a perpendicular brick wall. There was the noise of what seemed to be the scratching of claws, as if it experienced considerable difficulty in obtaining a hold on the unyielding surface. What kind of creature ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... Eyes.—A school teacher has remarked that many children are awkward, not through being ungainly in walking, but wholly because of impaired vision. It has been her experience with children in her department who were usually awkward and who had their eyes examined that there was something wrong with the vision, which was quickly overcome ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... to the window, and threw it open. The cool night air came in refreshingly. In the distance, the dark shapes of the mountains stood out forbiddingly in the moonlight. Millions of stars winked and twinkled. Gaunt cacti reared their ungainly shapes—beautiful because of ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... a note to George Borrow, so on him we called,—a tall, ungainly, uncouth man, with great physical strength, a quick penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation. He was sitting on one side of the fire, and his old mother on the other. His spirits always sink in wet weather, and to-day was very rainy, but he was courteous ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... earth is that?" suddenly cried the Captain, seizing his rifle and gazing into the gently swaying branches overhead. We looked, and saw an ungainly creature huddled among the spreading fronds, glaring at us with eyes that were half-human, half-catlike ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various

... people will profane the memory of their departed by these public advertisements of Slap & Dash, and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem. For surely nothing could be more unmeaning or more ungainly than the monumental urn, unless it be the monumental obelisk. The plain cross, by contrast, has the tenderest meaning, and is a simple and fitting monument that no repetition ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... one who ever knew, and I found out by chance. Ted Harper had borrowed "Fights for the Flag" from me, and when I got it back there was a soiled piece of paper in it with something written in Ted's ungainly hand. I thought he had been copying a passage, and anxious to see what had struck him, I opened the sheet out and read these words:—"O God, it's a hard business praying. But Roger made me promise. And you know how decent he's been to me and the crowd. Listen ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem

... thy heart warmed with the sweet promise of Christ's acceptance of the coming sinner, and that will make thee make more haste unto him. Discouraging thoughts they are like unto cold weather, they benumb the senses, and make us go ungainly about our business; but the sweet and warm gleads8 of promise are like the comfortable beams of the sun, which liven and refresh. 9 You see how little the bee and fly do play in the air in winter; why, the cold hinders them from doing it; but when the wind and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... said Pathfinder reproachfully, though he took her hand with kindness, "I have not desarved this. I know I am wild, and uncouth, and ungainly—" ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... desire to win the favour of the assembly by the same means. So he got up from his place and began dancing, but he cut such a ridiculous figure as he plunged about, and made such a grotesque exhibition of his ungainly person, that the beasts all fell upon him with ridicule and ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop

... adieu before the arrival of the older women in the rear, who with their heavy nailed boots were running towards us, plunging about in the deep ground in clumsy attempts at juvenile activity. A few of the young women were very pretty, but, as usual in Cyprus, their figures were ungainly, and their movements, hampered by baggy trousers and enormous high boots, were ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... Egmont Hake ("Macmillan's Magazine," 1882, Vol. XLV.) went so far as to say that Borrow was "perhaps the handsomest man of his day." On the other hand, Caroline Fox, the Quakeress, who called on Borrow in October, 1843, described him as "a tall, ungainly man, with great physical strength, quick, penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation." It was on April 11th, 1843, that Sir Robert Peel pronounced his striking eulogy on ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper

... render it, the writer who pre-eminently in his generation had busied himself to "detect and save," in human creatures, such sparks of virtue as misery or vice had not availed to extinguish; to discover what is beautiful and comely under what commonly passes for the ungainly and the deformed; to draw happiness and hopefulness from despair itself; and, above all, so to have made known to his own countrymen the wants and sufferings of the poor, the ignorant, and the neglected, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... the candle and softly opened his door. The sudden cold draft from the hall made the candle flare, but as it steadied, Hinton saw that an old cot had been placed across the door opposite his, as if on guard, and that beside it knelt an ungainly figure in white, with his head clasped in his hands. It was Mr. Opp ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice

... was made in six days, was one woman; but Mrs. Maloney, standing with bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was another; and Peter Sangree, the Canadian pupil, with his pale skin, and his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a knife. She ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, too, with willing pleasure, for in spite of his general ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... side, admiring Madame Frehlter's poodle. Madelon could afford to be civil to the poodle before company. The contrast between the two girls was sufficiently striking. Cydalise was fair and bright-looking—Mademoiselle Frehlter was square and ungainly of figure, swarthy of ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... his own use. That was necessary, obligatory. Yet, why must he retain it? He did not propose to return and live here at any future time. This episode was over—or rather, had it not simply failed of completion? Was it not, like all the rest, maimed, lopped off ungainly, docked? Then, where came in the obligation to reserve these rooms? He could not remember. Yet he knew that he was compelled ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... awkward misshapen limbs resembled the contorted branches of wind-blown trees, and whose coarse and repulsive countenances betokened that malignant delight in evil-doing which only demons are supposed to know. These ungainly servitors possessed themselves of the Laureate's chafing steeds, and led them and the chariot away into some unseen courtyard; while the Laureate himself, still saying no word, kept fast hold of his companion's arm, and hurried ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... death animating so many of nature's aspects. The city is man-made. Well planned, properly built and organized, it might have become an ornament beautifying and exalting nature. Page the cities of the West one by one—they are monotonous, ungainly, ugly slums and rookeries set off by an ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... taste, of environment and experience, not these alone make up the sum of their unlikeness. You had only to look from the fresh simplicity of white muslin blouse and olive-coloured cloth in the one case, to the ungainly expensiveness of the black silk gown of the married woman, in order to get from the first a sense of dainty morning freshness, and from Mrs. Fox-Moore not alone a lugubrious memento mori sort of impression, but that more disquieting reminder of the ugly and over-elaborate thing ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... and from near them rose the smoke. There was, however, no sign of life; and not a sound broke the awful silence of the desert, as we breasted the rise. Then a vulture flapped lazily up in front of us, and another and another and a tiger- wolf (hyena) lurched its gorged and ungainly carcass ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... was room for improvement. Changes were made indeed, but these changes can hardly be said to have been made in the direction of either comfort, convenience, or good taste. The "Albert hat" (as it was called), one of the ugliest, most ungainly, and preposterous of military shakoes that was ever invented, made its appearance about this time, and the idea was credited (rightly or wrongly) to the amiable prince. Constant reference to this preposterous invention ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... the quarter-deck, and regarding us with looks of undisguised alarm. They were totally unarmed, and most of them unclothed. One or two, however, wore portions of European attire. One had on a pair of duck trousers, which were much too large for him, and stuck out in a most ungainly manner; another wore nothing but the common, scanty, native garment round the loins and a black beaver hat; but the most ludicrous personage of all, and one who seemed to be chief, was a tall, middle-aged man, of a mild, simple expression ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne

... prolonged drought at a susceptible period of development, and had never recovered. The one proof that blood ran in her veins was the pimply quality of her ruined complexion, and the pimples of that brickish expanse proved that the blood was thin and bad. Her hands and feet were large and ungainly; the skin of the fingers was roughened by coarse contacts to the texture of emery-paper. On six days a week she wore black; on the seventh a kind of discreet half-mourning. She was honest, capable, and industrious; and beyond the confines of her occupation ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... boy had flung himself from his horse, dropping the reins to the ground, and the animal, although snorting and shivering, had no thought of disgracing his training by breaking his parole. With quick, ungainly strides the boy brought himself to the upturned machine. It was curious that he should appear to such disadvantage on his feet. In the saddle ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... large; where, after many years' wanderings and sojournings, he picked up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my little pretensions to wisdom—I have met with few who understood men, their manners, and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly integrity, and headlong, ungovernable irascibility, are disqualifying circumstances; consequently, I was born a very poor man's son. For the first six or seven years of my life, my father was gardener to a worthy gentleman of small estate in the neighbourhood ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... a dreadful fascination he watched the ungainly, hill-like reptile shuffle ponderously forward and realized that, high on its back, was fixed a small fort, rather like those howdahs or boxes which are fastened to the backs of elephants. Chilled with the nearness of death, Nelson counted six mail-clad warriors in the howdah. Then the true ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... her father, and where was Ste. Marie? The first question answered itself, for as she turned her eyes toward the west she saw O'Hara's tall, ungainly figure disappearing in the direction of the house. She called his name twice, but it may be that the man did not hear, for he went on without pausing and was ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman

... never quite sure if Isabel were eighteen or twenty, or whether Clara or Susie came next. He once forgot Laura altogether, and was only reminded of her existence by the shock of surprise at seeing the awkward-looking, ungainly girl standing before him, looking shyly up in ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... some scholarship, whose ambition had been crushed by the weight of his possessions. He had a remarkably fine library at Challis Court, but he made little use of it, for he spent the greater part of his time in travel. In appearance he was rather an ungainly man; his great head and the bulk of his big shoulders were something too heavy ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... had died when she was a very little girl. He was a man of remarkable character. He had great strength of will and immense determination; and Maggie, his only child, took after him. She resembled him in appearance also, for he was very plain of face and rather ungainly of figure. Maggie's mother, on the other hand, was a delicate, pretty, blue-eyed woman, who could as little manage her headstrong young daughter as a lamb could manage a young lion. Mrs. Howland was intensely amiable. Maggie was very good to ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade

... the demonstrations displayed by their beaux. It was pleasant to look at the nice little straw-goods damsel with the boyish hair, and to mark the contrast between her kitten glidings and the premeditated atrocities of Raw Material, as he wove and unwove his ungainly legs before her, in a manner appalling to witness. She had only a common palm-leaf fan, I remarked,—worth, probably, about two cents. But Young New York, as he waited patiently for the deadly ocean-malady ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... though he has all the evening been admiring her vastly, and would have given anything for such a chance; but next, having to "lie the length of a looby, the breadth of a booby," &c., he is eminently successful—yet, who shall say the ungainly cub may not one day be an ornament to society! Poor Muff! he has no mother or sisters—the only specimens of girlhood known to him are the maids at home, and the school-master's daughter, that dines with the parlour-boarders at Addle House:—brave boy, thou art clever, but ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner

... but surely struggled out of the ugliness of her childhood; and John Crewys, regarding her critically in the lamplight, decided she would develop, one of these days, into a very handsome young woman; in spite of an ungainly stoop, a wide mouth that pouted rather too much, and a nose that inclined ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture

... where a horse must needs lose flesh daily, from pure lack of provender. However, there was no time to make a change, so I was fain to hope that easy journeys at first, and a light weight on his back, might gradually bring the ungainly beast into better form. It appeared that he was just recovering from the distemper and "sore tongue," which had followed each other in rapid succession. These two diseases are the terror and bane of Virginian and Maryland stables. An animal who has once surmounted them is supposed to be ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... Collot d'Herbois to find the door; he tore it open, letting in a feeble ray of light from the corridor. He stood in the doorway one moment, his slouchy, ungainly form distinctly outlined against the lighter background beyond, a look of exultant and malicious triumph, of deadly hate and cruelty distinctly imprinted on his face and with upraised hand wildly ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... motionless. The other foot was drawn up so as to be hidden in the feathers of the under part of its body. Its neck was crooked back so far that its long bill rested on its breast. It was seemingly asleep, and looked so ungainly that Ellen laughed outright, despite Addison's injunctions ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... conducted papers in the kingdom, and had a wide-spread circulation. Mr. Baines represented Leeds as successor to Mr. Macaulay, and as representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... the tutelary images of most great Italian towns. I have examined nineteen of them, and made drafts of them. If they came from the sky, our worst sculptors are our angels. But my mind is easy on that score. Ungainly statue or villainous daub fell never yet from heaven to smuggle the bread out of capable workmen's mouths. All this is Pagan, and arose thus. The Trojans had Oriental imaginations, and feigned that their ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... of the orchard was still further to the left, near a tier of rocks which there began to soar upwards. There you found yourself in a veritable land of fire, in a natural hot-house, on which the sun fell freely. At first, you had to make your way through huge, ungainly fig trees, which stretched out grey branches like arms weary of lying still, and whose villose leather-like foliage was so dense that in order to pass one constantly had to snap off twigs that had sprouted from ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... analyze it is to discover that it is extremely melodious; that it reflects a gloomy mood; that at the root of its sorrow is the mysterious "lost Lenore"; and that, as in most of Poe's works, a fantastic element is introduced, an "ungainly fowl" addressed with grotesque dignity as "Sir, or Madame," to divert attention from the fact that the poet's grief is not simple or human ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... loomed in the dusk, heavy and formidable. He was as big as a man, somewhat lank, and covered with coarse hair the colour of cocoanut matting. This afternoon, when the early patrons entered, they found him hanging limply by one arm, like a great ungainly bat. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson

... sympathetic ears. Being both plump and energetic, she suffered cruelly in the heat; mopped her face without shame between her sentences; and, according to Frank Olliver, lived chiefly on lime-squash, and a limitless admiration for her missionary husband,—a large, ungainly man, with the manners of a shy schoolboy, and the wrapt gaze of a seer; a man who, in an age of fanaticism, would have walked smiling to the rack. As it was, he walked with no less equanimity through the pestilential ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... This was a big, ungainly, beak-nosed boy, whose sleeves were much too short, and trousers-legs likewise, to hide Nature's abundant gift to him in the matter of bone and knuckle. He was freckled and wore a grin that was ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... any joint in his body independently of the rest. He cracked his fingers persistently when he talked after a fashion that would have been intolerable in anyone but Capper. His hands were always in some ungainly attitude, and yet they were wonderful hands, strong and sensitive, the colour of ivory. His eyes were small and green, sharp as the eyes of a lizard. They seemed to take in everything ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... provided for—an important matter, for the Schulenburgs were as poor as they were proud—and she was too unattractive to get into mischief. But it is the unexpected that often happens; and no sooner had the Elector's son and heir, George, set eyes on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell. To George—an awkward, sullen young man of loutish manners and loose morals—the gaunt ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... well. There followed a moment of angry controversy, during which the startled negroes rested upon their oars, while the enraged guard threatened to fire if they drifted a yard closer. In the midst of this hubbub a head suddenly popped up above the rail. Then a tall, ungainly figure, clad in a faded, ill-fitting uniform, raised itself slowly, leaning far out over the side, a pair of weak eyes, shadowed by colored glasses, gazing down inquiringly into the ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... to the ungainly externals of Jack Tier. She now wore a cap, thus concealing the short, gray bristles of hair, and lending to her countenance a little of that softness which is a requisite of female character. Some attention had also been paid to the rest of her attire; and Jack was, altogether, less repulsive ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... the old philosopher could not control his anger, and shouted to his companion: "Oh, you innocent lamb of knowledge! You gentle sucking doves, all of you! And would you give the name of arguments to those distorted, clumsy, narrow-minded, ungainly, crippled things? Yes, I have just now been listening to the fruits of some of this present-day culture, and my ears are still ringing with the sound of historical 'self-understood' things, of over-wise and pitiless ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... likewise furnished with a felt hat well garnished with turnpike tickets; and a carter's whip. Thus equipped, he was to saunter into the office, as some country fellow from Covent Garden market might be supposed to do for the gratification of his curiousity; and as he was as awkward, ungainly, and raw-boned a fellow as need be, Mr. Fagin had no fear but that he would look the part ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens

... it was entirely different. His drawing may have been as faulty as people said it was, and he may have been as fond as they also said of bestowing upon all his subjects exaggerated and almost ungainly features, which possibly belonged to the Blessed Damozel, but were not the most indisputable part of her blessedness. But they were, despite their similarity of type, all personal and individual, and all suggestive to the mind and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... enough law to become an attorney, and went to Springfield, and after that it was only a short time before he had won his clients. His cousin Denny came to hear him try one of his first cases. He watched the tall, lank young fellow, still as ungainly as in his early boyhood, and heard him tell the jury some of those same stories he had read aloud before ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland

... together to where the creature lay. The Maid durst not look on the dead monster, but Walter noted that he was girt with a big ungainly sax; so he drew it from the sheath, and there smote off the hideous head of the fiend with his own weapon. Then they twain together laboured the earth, she with Walter's sword, he with the ugly sax, till they had made a grave deep and ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris

... all smiles, and Toby returned her welcome something sheepishly. He cut a quaint figure with his broad, ungainly shoulders supporting his rather pumpkin face. Then his arms were a little too long and terminated ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... the table and held out her arms—the thin, fleshless arms—straight, no deviation to the ungainly shoulders. There was unconscious drama in it. Yet she was the last person ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston

... a heavy spattering of loose earth, and a squelching of saddle-leather, as the Klopstock youth lumbered up to the rails and delivered himself of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse laid his ears well back as the ungainly bay cob and his appropriately matched rider drew up beside him; his verdict was reflected and endorsed by the ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here in a corner of my library. I keep it hid behind a curtain,—it is such a rough, ungainly thing. Yet there are about it touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master's hand. Sometimes,—to-night, for instance,—the curtain is accidentally drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... abandoned their young to their fate. They perched on trees a hundred yards or so distant, and watched to see what would go forward. Rob worked his way on up the tree and peered curiously over the edge of the wretched brush-heap which served as the nest. Here he saw two large, ungainly young birds, not yet able to fly, but able to spit, scratch, and flap their wings. Getting a good foothold on a supporting branch, Rob made several attempts to get hold of the young birds. Finally he succeeded in getting one ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough

... which he had developed, ever have become an acrobat? He was the leanest, scraggiest long thing I have ever seen. Six foot four of stringy sinew and bone, with inordinately long legs, around which his khaki slacks flapped, as though they hid stilts instead of human limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly, the sleeves of his tunic far above the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the sparse rugosity ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... receptacle on which the pistils sit well formed and capable of being developed into a perfect berry, or do they look ungainly in shape? Are the petals pure white or slightly crimson? Are there many runners, or few, or none? Do the new runners bear blossoms and fruit? If so, when do they commence to bud and bloom? When do the berries begin to ripen? Notice the size and shape of the fruit, also the color. You can tell ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various

... brother as a duty, than strove to repress it. Yet not for the world would my father have grudged him anything that money could purchase. That was, as it were, in the bond when he had wedded my mother. Gregory was lumpish and loutish, awkward and ungainly, marring whatever he meddled in, and many a hard word and sharp scolding did he get from the people about the farm, who hardly waited till my father's back was turned before they rated the stepson. I am ashamed—my heart is sore to think how I fell into the fashion of the family, ...
— The Half-Brothers • Elizabeth Gaskell

... maker of the three nests, of which the last was half as large as the others, produced no less than a thousand eggs; eight hundred were deposited in the larger nests and two or three hundred in the smaller. Truly a fine family, but a thought ungainly, were it not that only a few ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... momentary silence spake Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make; "They sneer at me for leaning all awry: What! did the Hand then of the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... or an occasional cottonwood, yellow-breasted meadowlarks were singing sweetly. At intervals a flock of curlews circled above the rider, uttering their sharp, plaintive cries; then they would drop to the ground and run rapidly to and fro on their frail, stilt-like legs, their long ungainly bills darting from side to side in search ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony

... of the graces of life. Let thy body be stalwart, yet not ungainly either in motion or in repose. Let not thy face alone, but thy whole body, make manifest the alertness of thy mind. Yet let all this be without affectation. (Book vii., ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... curious boat-bill heron is found,—its short thick neck and enormous beak giving it a clumsy, ungainly look alongside the elegant flamingo. The beak may be likened to two boats, laid one upon the other, gunwale to gunwale, the upper part of the mandible representing the keel. It feeds on the Crustacea which it picks up on the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... quite like, who thinks of hating her for it? If one's mother is a little provoking and tedious under the oppressive weight of years or sickness, who thinks of making a great hardship of it? But if the poor, humble friend is only a little awkward or ungainly, she is odious; and if the poor, deserted mother, or widow, wife, or aged suffering creature is a little irritable or tedious, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... born of, a hard-working, hard-fighting stock. She fell to wondering what her life would have been like had she been born a Chinese woman, or an Italian woman like those she saw, head-shawled or bareheaded, squat, ungainly and swarthy, who carried great loads of driftwood on their heads up from the beach. Then she laughed at her foolishness, remembered Billy and the four-roomed cottage on Pine Street, and went to bed with her mind filled for the hundredth time with ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... is an impressive or at least a striking and unusual figure; he is tall, lank, and ungainly, almost Lincolnesque in the carelessness of his apparel and the exceeding awkwardness of his postures and manners. His angular features, sharp nose, pale face, and dark hair suggest the strain of ascetism, almost of fanaticism, which runs ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... sitting, Trina was no longer frank and straight-forward. Now she was circumspect, reserved, distant. He could no longer open his mouth; words failed him. At one sitting in particular they had said but good-day and good-by to each other. He felt that he was clumsy and ungainly. He told ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... Snozzle was quiet, rich, and philosophical; and Saunders made a Judy of himself with unparalleled success. Frank Finch got his deserts in the hands of a Mr. Everett; for being a lover, no matter how awkward and ungainly an actor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... being the leaders of the herds are always singled out, and after a desperate and trying gallop over a rugged country, the huntsman finds himself going stride for stride alongside one of these Kings of the Forest, and wondering how an animal so ungainly in his gait, can get over the country at such a pace. Jumping over fallen trees, and dodging round others, he at last finds himself on a clear spot, when drawing a pistol from his holster, and riding up so as almost to touch the animal's side, he ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes

... met any one, or passed through a town, glances of surprise and curiosity followed them; for it seemed as if the living images of night and day were walking side by side over the land. Fausch's clothes were dark and coarse, such as he always wore. They hung loose and heavy about his ungainly form, his hands were blackened, and his large head, which was set upon his broad shoulders as if thrust forward to meet some obstacle, matched them in color; his thick curly hair was deep black, and his face looked as if tanned by the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... on the tin box. Coutlass did not drop it but turned his head to look behind him. Schillingschen swung for his face with a clenched fist and the whole weight and strength of his ungainly body. He would have broken the jaw he aimed at had the blow landed; but the Greek's wit ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... swarming with animal life, as is to be expected in the luxurious East. There are no fewer than thirty mosques in the town, whose minarets give it a beautiful and picturesque appearance, albeit that the buildings themselves are imperfect, and ungainly in architectural detail. The Mussulmans have a school in the town, where Turkish and Slavish are taught. Girls are, however, debarred this advantage, and indeed no institution of any kind exists throughout the province for their ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot

... first-aid pouch and a long ungainly rifle patterned after the Daniel Boone period, and you have an idea of ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey

... went for walks along the river with an enormous mother and ungainly sisters, escorted gravely by Dundas. The mess did not approve ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois

... than ten minutes it loomed up before him, a mass of deeper black in the blackness. No white vision floated on the broken battlements this night, as Sir Norman looked wistfully up at them; but neither was there any ungainly dwarf, with two-edged sword, guarding the ruined entrance; and Sir Norman passed unmolested in. He sought the spiral staircase which La Masque had spoken of, and, passing carefully from one ancient chamber ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming



Words linked to "Ungainly" :   ungainliness, unmanageable, clumsy



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com