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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"






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"Ungainly" Quotes from Famous Books



... little paddles that went flapping, flapping all the time, keeping him constantly in motion, whether the little fellow wanted to go or not. So he kept scudding along in the water, dodging from right to left, to avoid the ungainly creatures that wanted to eat him. There were crabs and clams, of a fashion that neither you nor I will ever see alive. There were huge animals with great eyes, savage jaws and long feelers, that sat in the end of a long, round shell and glowered ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... oblique glance imparts an air of suspicion to the whole assembly, will suggest merely a notion of their grotesqueness. By and by we shall grow used to the deformities, and recognize the primitive truthfulness of attitude and expression, the spirit which animates these ungainly forms and faces, until at length we look at the painter with the eyes of his contemporaries, and judge him by the standards of his own time, on which his claims rest. Then we shall admire him. The Venetians of the sixteenth century are the easiest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... she said, and in silence led the way to a pleached alley out of sight of the windows. There they stood still. It was a strange meeting of two who had not seen each other for fourteen years, when the one was a tall, ungainly youth, the other well-nigh a child. And now Giles was a fine, soldierly man in the prime of life, with a short, curled beard, and powerful, alert bearing, and Aldonza, though the first flower of her youth had gone by, yet, having lived a sheltered and ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... in the poorest and most neglected 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 swarthy, singing, hopeful young ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... through the air. A moment later, a band of perhaps from three to four hundred penguins would scramble out on to the stones with great rapidity, at once exchanging the vigorous and graceful movements for which they were so remarkable while in the water for the most ludicrous and ungainly ones possible now that they were on terra firma; for, they tumbled about on the shingle and apparently with difficulty assumed the normal position which is their habit when on land—that of standing upright ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson


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