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Unruly   /ənrˈuli/   Listen
Unruly

adjective
(compar. unrulier, superl. unruliest)
1.
Noisy and lacking in restraint or discipline.  Synonyms: boisterous, rambunctious, robustious, rumbustious.  "A social gathering that became rambunctious and out of hand" , "A robustious group of teenagers" , "Beneath the rumbustious surface of his paintings is sympathy for the vulnerability of ordinary human beings" , "An unruly class"
2.
Unwilling to submit to authority.  Synonym: disobedient.
3.
Of persons.  Synonyms: indocile, uncontrollable, ungovernable.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Unruly" Quotes from Famous Books



... surest way of stopping the unruly woman's mouth. "No!" he mused. "That would never do here—on shipboard. The steward, old Heinrichs, is too smart for all that. I must get her away into some lonely place abroad. For only in that way can I hide Clayton's fate from her. ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... begin to twinkle in the windows and a swinging oil-lamp to cast a dim light here and there in the streets. But as his company passes out of a narrow lane debouching on to the chief market-place, their progress is stopped by the sudden rush of a mingled crowd of unruly apprentices and journeymen returning from their sports, with hot heads well beliquored. Then from another side-street there is a sudden flare of torches, borne aloft by guildsmen come out to quell the tumult and to ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax

... the 13th Evans' nose, which had been more or less frost-bitten for some weeks, had an especially bad attack. His attitude [Page 169] to this unruly member was one of comic forbearance, as though, while it scarcely belonged to him, he was more or less responsible for it and so had to make excuses. On this occasion when told that it had 'gone,' he remarked in a resigned tone, 'My poor old nose again; well, there, it's chronic!' By ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... theologians," said a Catholic contemporary, accumulating all the religious offences of the Prince in a single paragraph, "because they keep strictly the constitutions of the Church without conceding a single point to their adversaries; he blamed the Calvinists as seditious and unruly people, yet nevertheless had a horror for the imperial edicts which condemned them to death; he said it was a cruel thing to take a man's life for sustaining an erroneous opinion; in short, he fantasied in his imagination a kind of religion, half ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... that should have been accomplished, much of it botched and ruined, so that it had better have been let alone; and then into the bargain to hear his wife complain half the night how the servants had been unruly, had given impudent answers, and done just what they pleased, and how she hated to have it so—and if he ever went away again she would run off too. It is terrible for a man who has to go away (and the necessity arises occasionally) if the heavy sighs begin on the homeward ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various


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