Uncomfortable means unpleasant for your body, or awkward for your feelings. An uncomfortable chair, an uncomfortable silence, feel uncomfortable.
The emotional sense is at least as common as the physical one: an uncomfortable question, uncomfortable truths, made everybody uncomfortable. That use is a careful way of saying something is troubling without saying what is wrong with it. Note uncomfortably, which is common before adjectives — uncomfortably close, uncomfortably warm; and discomfort, which is the noun for the state.
1adjectiveuncomfortableUnpleasant for the body.
“The chairs are uncomfortable and the meetings are shorter for it.”
2adjectiveawkwardAwkward or troubling.
“There was an uncomfortable moment when she asked him about his divorce.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
uncomfortable is a state of unease.
Old French
confortable
Middle English
comfortable
English
comfortable
English, today
uncomfortable
From un- + comfortable. comfortable comes from Middle English comfortable, from Old French confortable, from conforter. by surface analysis, comfort + -able.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA