ugly: [13] Ugly originally meant ‘horrible, frightening’; ‘offensive to the sight’ is a secondary development, first recorded in the 14th century. The word was borrowed from Old Norse uggligr, a derivative of the verb ugga ‘fear’. In the early 1930s it was applied, in the altered spelling ugli, to a new sort of citrus fruit, a hybrid of the grapefruit and the tangerine; the reference is to the fruit’s unprepossessing knobbly skin.
ugly (adj.)
mid-13c., uglike "frightful or horrible in appearance," from a Scandinavian source, such as Old Norse uggligr "dreadful, fearful," from uggr "fear, apprehension, dread" (perhaps related to agg "strife, hate") + -ligr "-like" (see -ly (1)). Meaning softened to "very unpleasant to look at" late 14c. Extended sense of "morally offensive" is attested from c. 1300; that of "ill-tempered" is from 1680s.
Among words for this concept, ugly is unusual in being formed from a root for "fear, dread." More common is a compound meaning "ill-shaped" (such as Greek dyseides, Latin deformis, Irish dochrud, Sanskrit ku-rupa). Another Germanic group has a root sense of "hate, sorrow" (see loath). Ugly duckling (1877) is from the story by Hans Christian Andersen, first translated from Danish to English 1846. Ugly American "U.S. citizen who behaves offensively abroad" is first recorded 1958 as a book title.
雙語例句
1. I thought they were laughing at me because I was ugly.
我覺得他們嘲笑我是因為我長得醜。
來自柯林斯例句
2. The Memorial seems almost ugly, dominating the landscape for miles around.
那座紀念碑聳立在方圓數英裏景致之中顯得近乎難看。
來自柯林斯例句
3. What ugly things; throw them away, throw them away.
多難看的東西啊，扔掉，扔掉。
來自柯林斯例句
4. The extreme right reared its ugly head in the 1980s.