- 1（頭髮、鬍子、衣著）蓬亂的、沒整理的；（花園、草地）沒修剪、荒蕪的
and not looked after. Its home ground is hair — unkempt hair is uncombed, sticking out, clearly not brushed for a while — and from there it spreads to beards, clothes and a person's whole appearance, and then to gardens, hedges, lawns and grounds that have not been cut back. In every case the picture is the same: something living that should have been trimmed or tidied, and was not. It is a slightly literary, old-fashioned word; you find it far more in novels and descriptive writing than in speech, where people just say 'messy'. The tone is usually , but it can be or even attractive in fiction — the unkempt artist. It is used before a noun or after 'be' or 'look'.
組成un- (not) + kempt, an old past participle meaning 'combed', from the almost-vanished verb 'kemb', to comb. So it literally means 'not combed' — which is why hair is where it fits most naturally. The everyday word 'comb' is its close relation.
同家族的字
- kemptthe rare positive form, 'neatly combed, tidy' — now used mostly as a joke
- combthe same old Germanic word for combing, at the root of kempt
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，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。
unkemptadj/ˌʌnˈkɛmpt/
- 1
uncombed, dishevelled.
- He was a queer shoot, again, in his unkempt longish hair and slovenly clothes, a sort of very vulgar down-at-heel American in appearance.
- Men on cycles, lean-faced, unkempt, scorched along every country lane, shouting of unhoped deliverance, shouting to gaunt, staring figures of despair.
- 2
Disorderly; untidy; messy; not kept up.
- unkempt bedroom
- And his egotism and conceit were not to be borne; and then he was both tawdry and dirty in his person; more greasily, mattedly unkempt than even a really successful pianist has any right to be, even in the best society.
- 3
Rough; unpolished.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。