Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Well-intentioned \Well`-in*ten"tioned\, a. Having upright intentions or honorable purposes.
Dutchmen who had sold themselves to France, as the
wellintentioned party.
--Macaulay.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
a. Having good intentions, even if producing unfortunate results.
WordNet
adj. marked by good intentions though often producing unfortunate results; "a well-intentioned but clumsy waiter"; "a well-meaning but tactless fellow"; "the son's well-meaning efforts threw a singular chill upon the father's admirers"- S.W.Maughm; "blunt but well-meant criticism" [syn: well-meaning, well-meant]
Usage examples of "well-intentioned".
Now, in a hundred schools and colleges, will stand up the solemn, well-intentioned man before a row of pretty girls, and tell them about Womanhood and its Duties, and they will listen just as shyly as if they were getting news, and needed to be instructed by a man on a subject which has engaged their entire attention since they were five years old.
Its well-intentioned wanderings and blunderings were somehow meant to be combined with the fierce determination of a piebald pony, running in its tight circle with a kind of traumatized invariance, apparently prepared to keep doing that forever while the elephant plodded helplessly about, so anxious to please, black rheum thrown off from its eyes like sweat, its damp-damaged hide lightly coated with the kind of hair that sprouts out near a healing wound, gingery and brittle, like the weft of baklava.
The teenage black punks, twisted by lives of poverty and suffering in the well-intentioned welfare state, twisted again by the circulated agit-prop of the Black Muslims and the Death's Angels, became the roving shock troops of race war by random terror.
He declined well-intentioned offers of coffee and beer, and looked calmingly at the small dog who was edging close to offer worship.
Someone so gentle that he made the clumsy graspings of men, no matter how well-intentioned, seem hurtful things.
The people advocating calli are well-intentioned, but what they’re doing is infantilizing us.
Brother Abraham knew nothing, but he quickly looked through hi book, and while the two well-intentioned missionaries tried vainly to catch the shreds of knowledge that would have saved a life, on the rude bed Sister Urania grew weaker and weaker.
In the absence of experienced mentors, the inexperienced selectors had continued doing their well-intentioned worst.
Nothing felt the last tattered shreds of his old life--the town, the desperately apathetic crowd at Skittle's, the two well-intentioned fools who had pretended to be his parents--tear loose and drift away on the warm river of Zillah's tongue.