- 1不尋常而令人擔憂的；不妥當的（常用於否定句：沒發生什麼異狀）
Untoward describes something unexpected that also causes trouble or embarrassment — bad news, awkward, not what should have happened. Its natural home is the negative sentence, and this is the single most useful thing to know about it. 'Nothing untoward happened.' 'The doctors found nothing untoward.' 'There was no sign of anything untoward.' You will meet this word saying that everything was fine far more often than saying something went wrong.
Because of that habit, it lives in reports, news, police statements, medical notes, and formal speech — places where people are calmly telling you there is nothing to worry about. It is a careful, slightly distant word, chosen partly because it is polite. Saying a guest's behaviour was 'untoward' is much softer than saying it was rude or improper, though everyone understands what you mean.
It also goes AFTER the word it describes when used with 'nothing', 'anything', 'something' — nothing untoward, not untoward nothing. That is normal for these words, but worth noticing.
Two pronunciations exist. In Britain many people say it as three , un-tuh-WORD; in America un-TORD is common. Both are correct.
組成un-（不）＋ toward。這裡的 toward 是舊用法，當形容詞用，意思接近『順從的、乖巧的、順利的』。所以 untoward 原意是『不順的、不聽話的』。
同家族的字
- towardthe second half; the old adjective sense 'favourable, compliant' has died out, leaving only the preposition
- towardsthe same word, still alive as a preposition meaning in the direction of
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。
untowardadj/ˌʌn.tʊˈwɔːd/
- 1
Unfavourable, adverse, or disadvantageous.
- But as soon as her son espied her, bowl in hand, he thought that haply something untoward had befallen her, but he would not ask of aught until such time as she had set down the bowl, when she acquainted him with that which had occurred[…]
- Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by toil and saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for the dominion of an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the advance-guard of a mighty civilization to be.
- 2
Unruly, troublesome; not easily guided.
- 3
Unseemly, improper.
- She could hardly have made a more untoward choice.
- The managing director was very depressed at the news, but realized that trying to prove anything untoward had taken place would be very difficult.
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。