unpromising

adjectiveC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,601 of 15,258neutral

Unpromising means showing little sign of turning out well. An unpromising start.

It is a judgement made early and is often wrong, which is why the word is usually followed by but. An unpromising beginning is the standard opening of any success story.

Definitions of unpromising

1adjectiveunpromisingShowing little sign of turning out well.C2
“The unpromising site turned into the best garden in the village.”

unpromising is a quality.

Where it comes from

From un- + promising.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

unpromising in the wild

After an unpromising start, her works became known in the late 1930s and 1940s for their interest in nature.
Kateryna Bilokur
Testing revealed unpromising performance and characteristics and Gloster recognised the Meteor as having more development potential and the aircraft never entered production.
Gloster E.1/44
But there were no such means of beguiling the time in this apartment, which was as unpromising and tiresome as any waiting-room....
East Sitting Hall
After a somewhat unpromising start, they were installed in their current location without the benefit of the original design for their display.
The Naked Ladies
The Jensen Ranch was established in an unpromising section of Sublette County in sagebrush land.
Jensen Ranch (Boulder, Wyoming)

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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.

Related words

promising

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