unpalatable

adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,912 of 15,258leans written

Unpalatable means unpleasant to eat, or hard to accept. Unpalatable food, an unpalatable truth, politically unpalatable.

The figurative sense is now the commoner: an unpalatable truth is one nobody wants to hear, and politically unpalatable means a policy is right and unsellable. The palate inside it is the roof of the mouth, taken as the seat of taste.

Definitions of unpalatable

1adjectiveunpalatableUnpleasant to eat, or hard to accept.C1
“The hospital food was so unpalatable that most patients sent their plates back untouched.”

unpalatable is a quality.

Where it comes from

From un- + palatable.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Smell & Taste

Practise this word

unpalatable in the wild

However, many species have an unpalatable texture or taste.
Jelly fungus
Like many other brightly coloured moths, it is unpalatable; the larvae use members of the genus Senecio as food plants.
Cinnabar moth
The fruits are green with white or no stripes' and have unpalatable seeds.
Trichosanthes dioica
Fungi of this genus vary in their edibility for humans; some are edible and tasty, some unpalatable, and some outright poisonous.
Hypholoma
The calcium carbonate makes it unpalatable to most rocky shore grazers.
Corallina officinalis

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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.

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