Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
a. 1 not congenial, compatible or sympathetic 2 not appropriate; unsuitable 3 not pleasing; disagreeable 4 (context botany English) incapable of being grafted
WordNet
adj. not suitable to your tastes or needs; "the uncongenial roommates were always fighting"; "the task was uncongenial to one sensitive to rebuffs" [syn: incompatible] [ant: congenial]
very unfavorable to life or growth; "a hostile climate"; "an uncongenial atmosphere"; "an uncongenial soil"; "the unfriendly environment at high altitudes" [syn: hostile, unfriendly]
used of plant stock or scions; incapable of being grafted
Usage examples of "uncongenial".
Having made one or two tentative remarks to the nearest miner, and receiving only short, gruff replies, the traveller resigned himself to uncongenial silence, staring moodily out of the window at the fading landscape.
To be bound hand and foot either by unsalable real estate or by sentiment is an uncomfortable condition for the young family who may find itself in uncongenial surroundings, in an unhealthful situation, or who may need to retrench temporarily.
It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its dearest pledges: and to reflect upon so many agreeable females with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, who hide their flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he assured them, made his heart weep.
It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne's wild and dreary, but life-long home.
It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forestland, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s wild and dreary, but life-long home.
When people were more closely tied to their birthplaces, their kin, and the social milieux into which they were born, they were compelled to associate with a variety of people, many of them uncongenial, with whom they were connected by accidents of birth or geography.
The injudiciousness of parents, a youth’s own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities for the congenial vocation, and their presence for an uncongenial, condemn numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and ill, when there are other things which they could have done well and happily.
Regina's she had spent her days in the streets, partly to escape from the uncongenial promiscuities of the boarding-house, and partly in the hope that physical fatigue would help her to sleep.
The uncongenial one was Nike Quinto, Chief of Intercosmic Social Welfare and Development.
I have seen elderly ladies who looked like waxwork advertisements for Mother's Day become raging tigresses when politics has been mentioned, and babes scarcely weaned bash babes of uncongenial opinion with their dollies, as election day draws near.
Admittedly, if we go into a future where time machines are less scarce, we should be able to make the journey in, as it were, several hops, but some of the periods between 1896 and the End of Time were exceptionally uncongenial and we could easily land in one of those.