ugly

the ugly view of his deformed crimes

1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, stanza 48:

O, I have passed a miserable night, / So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams.

c. 1593 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Richard the Third: […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act I, scene iv]:

When the poor man’s integuments, no longer nourished from within, become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity, wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier;[…]— yes then, you may say, his usefulness once more is quite obstructed;[…]it is time that he take to bed, and prepare for departure, which cannot now be distant!

1843, Thomas Carlyle, “XVII: The Beginnings”, in Past and Present, book 2:

In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world.

1957, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Viking Press, →OCLC:

Displeasing to the eye; aesthetically unpleasing.

Displeasing to the ear or some other sense.

He played an ugly trick on us.

All this was extraordinarily distasteful to Churchill. It was ugly, gross. Never before had he felt such repulsion when the vicar displayed his characteristic bluntness or coarseness of speech. In the present connexion—or rather as a transition from the subject that started their conversation—such talk had been distressingly out of place.

1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter XII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

Offensive to one's sensibilities or morality.

an ugly temper; to feel ugly

(Southern US) Ill-natured; crossgrained; quarrelsome.

an ugly rumour; an ugly customer; an ugly wound

With all this competition, expect things to get ugly.

Unpleasant; disagreeable; likely to cause trouble or loss.

en-adj

ugly (comparative uglier, superlative ugliest)

uglier (comparative)
ugliest (superlative)
ougly (alternative obsolete)

attractive

antonym(s) of “displeasing to the ear or some other sense”

moral

antonym(s) of “offensive to one's sensibilities or morality”

fall out of the ugly tree and hit every branch

Sranan Tongo: ogri

lelik

displeasing to the eye; not aesthetically pleasing

Inherited from Middle English ugly, uggely, uglike, borrowed from Old Norse uggligr (“fearful, dreadful, horrible in appearance”), from uggr (“fear, apprehension, dread”) (possibly related to agg (“strife, hate”)), equivalent to ug + -ly. Cognate with Scots ugly, uglie, Icelandic ugglegur. Meaning softened to "very unpleasant to look at" around the late 14th century, and sense of "morally offensive" attested from around 1300.
For the meaning development compare Bulgarian грозен (grozen) (< Proto-Slavic *grozьnъ), Russian стра́шный (strášnyj) (< Proto-Slavic *strašьnъ < *straxъ); Latin foedus (< Proto-Indo-European *bʰeyh₂-).


ugly

I want your ugly / I want your disease.

These are firstly for products which need a cool room; secondly for products which can be stored on a standard pallet without overhang; and thirdly for products known as "the uglies" which always overhang a standard pallet.

Non-standard products (abnormal or 'uglies'): many distribution operations are designed to cater for standard palletized products.

2022, Alan Rushton, Phil Croucher, Peter Baker, The Handbook of Logistics and Distribution Management, page 591:

(logistics, informal) Any product whose size and shape prevents it from fitting neatly on a pallet.

[…] camp-stools, telescopes, poetry-books, blue uglies, red petticoats, and parasols of every hue.

1857, Charles Kingsley, “(please specify the page)”, in Two Years Ago, volume (please specify |volume=I to III), Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC:

(UK, informal, dated) A shade for the face, projecting from a bonnet.

en-noun

ugly (countable and uncountable, plural uglies)

uglies (plural)
ougly (alternative obsolete)

Kackbratze

usually a woman, but can also refer to a man or child


ugly

I move noiselessly, eat my food carefully without uglying the dining table with its remnants, fold my bedsheets in neat rectangles and place them on the bed in perfect symmetry.

There is time when the absence of either integrity or humility has uglied the face of the church before the world and turned Christianity into just another cocoon of condemnation and hypocrisy.

2012, Najib George Awad, And Freedom Became a Public-square, page 197:

He had spent half of his journey mulling over how he would savour his revenge. He could already envision her pretty little form lying prone at his feet. He would take great pleasure in uglying her up a little before killing her.

2014, Jonathan Crocker, A Dream of Hope and Sorrow:

(transitive, nonstandard) To make ugly (sometimes with up).

en-verb

ugly (third-person singular simple present uglies, present participle uglying, simple past and past participle uglied)

uglies (present singular third-person)
uglying (participle present)
uglied (participle past)
uglied (past)
ougly (alternative obsolete)