Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

disreputable

UK/dɪsˈɹɛpjʊtəbəl/US/dɪsˈɹɛpjʊtəbəl/
adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,216 of 15,258neutral

Disreputable means not respectable in character, behaviour or appearance. You would not want to be seen with it.

It covers people, places and objects with equal ease, so a disreputable character, a disreputable pub and a disreputable old hat are all standard, and the last of those is affectionate. That range is the fun of the word, since applied to clothing it is fond and applied to a person it is a warning. The noun behind it is repute, and reputable is the positive form.

Definitions of disreputable

  1. 1adjectivedisreputableNot respectable in character or appearance.C1

    “He wore the same disreputable jacket for twenty years.”

Where it comes from

From dis- + reputable.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

disreputable in the wild

  • Black sheep is an idiom used to describe an odd or disreputable member of a group, especially within a family.

    Black sheep (disambiguation)

  • In typical Greene fashion, the seedy antihero wrestles with his conscience as murky moral dilemmas begin to trouble even his disreputable soul.

    England Made Me (novel)

  • Critics argue that the SSE is devoted to disreputable ideas far outside the scientific mainstream.

    Society for Scientific Exploration

  • Shady, a disreputable lawyer who is after the fortune to which he is heir, and Mrs.

    Frankie Doodle

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • repute
  • disrepute
  • reputable
  • reputation