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repugnant

UK/ɹɪˈpʌɡnənt/US/ɹɪˈpʌɡnənt/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,355 of 15,258neutral

Repugnant means so distasteful that it turns you against it. Morally repugnant, find it repugnant, repugnant to the law.

It is a strong moral word and stronger than distasteful, since repugnance is a reaction rather than a judgement. In law it has a technical sense: a clause repugnant to the rest of a contract contradicts it and is struck out.

Definitions of repugnant

  1. 1adjectiverepugnantSo distasteful that it turns you against it.C1

    “She found his racist jokes repugnant and walked out of the dinner.”

repugnant is a quality.

Where it comes from

Latin repugnans comes from repugnare, to fight against — re, back, plus pugnare, to fight.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *pewǵ-

  2. Latin

    repugnans

  3. Old French

    repugnant

  4. Middle English

    repugnaunt

  5. English, today

    repugnant

Built from

  • repugnare · Latin — to oppose, to fight against
  • re- · Latin — back, against
  • pugnare · Latin — to fight

From Middle English repugnaunt, from Old French repugnant, borrowed from Latin repugnans, present participle of repugnare (“to oppose, to fight against”), from re- (“back, against”) + pugnare (“to fight”); see pugnacious. by surface analysis, re- + pugn + -ant.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

repugnant in the wild

  • The battle honour is considered one of the repugnant battle honours of the Indian Army.

    Battle of Sholinghur

  • Most reviewers 'damned' the film as repugnant or tasteless.

    Nell's Eugenic Wedding

  • Some philosophers consider, however, that almost all credible theories of population ethics imply some form of the repugnant conclusion anyway.

    Non-identity problem

  • The mudra was described as "obscene" by the translator Rai Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu, and as "obscure and repugnant" by another translator, Hans-Ulrich Rieker.

    Vajroli mudra

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.