ungainly
adjective
Did you know?
What do you have to gain by knowing the root of ungainly? Plenty. The gain in ungainly is an obsolete English adjective meaning "direct" that ultimately comes from the Old Norse preposition gegn, meaning "against." (It is unrelated to the noun in "economic gains" or the verb in "gain an advantage"; those came to English by way of Anglo-French.) Ungainly can describe someone who is clumsy, as in "a tall, ungainly man"; or something that causes you to feel clumsy when you try to handle it, as in "a car with ungainly controls"; or something that simply looks awkward and out of place, as in "an ungainly strip mall."
Examples of ungainly in a Sentence
Robert Ross, Robb Report, 21 Feb. 2025
You're locked into an ungainly, spread armed, weak kneed
Character: snowplow.
—Outside Online, 19 Feb. 2025
And Farley was wild, crashing through tables, cramming himself into ungainly costumes, and going full red-faced dynamo mode all in pursuit of every last laugh in the building.
—Dennis Perkins, EW.com, 16 Feb. 2025
Straining for its ungainly combination of action, romance and silly comedy, Love Hurts doesn’t fully succeed in any department.
—Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter, 3 Sep. 2019
See All Example Sentences for ungainly
Cite this Entry
“Ungainly.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ungainly. Accessed 5 Mar. 2025.
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