- 1
Dressed too casually for where you are. Everyone else is in a suit or a nice dress, and you came in jeans and a T-shirt — you are underdressed. It is about the level of formality, not about the amount of cloth on your body, and this trips people up. A person in shorts on a hot beach is not underdressed; a person in shorts at a wedding is. The word almost always carries a feeling of mild embarrassment, and people usually use it about themselves: 'I felt so underdressed.' You will also hear the opposite, '', when you are the only one in a suit and everyone else came in shorts — and in many cultures, including Taiwan, being feels safer than being underdressed. Note that native speakers do sometimes use it loosely to mean 'not wearing enough clothes for the cold weather', though the formality meaning is the main one and the one dictionaries give.
穿得太隨便、不夠正式(跟場合不搭)。不是「穿太少」的意思——重點在場合的正式度。
組成under- (not enough) + dressed (wearing clothes, from the verb 'dress'). So: not dressed up to the level the occasion asks for.
同家族的字
- overdressedsame 'dressed', opposite prefix — too formal for the occasion
- dressthe root verb; 'dressed' is simply its past participle
- underdonesame under- meaning 'not enough'
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法,原文照列,我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的;有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
underdressedadj詞源 1
- 1
Insufficiently dressed, as for cold weather.
- 2
Insufficiently well-dressed, as for a formal event.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形:
資料來源:英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary(CC BY-SA 4.0)。 原文照列,未經改寫。