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say it: il
ill is an adjective, adverb and noun meaning "affected by an impairment of normal physical or mental function". It is pronounced /ˈɪl/ — il. It carries 9 recorded senses.
indicating hostility or enmity
“you certainly did me an ill turn”
“ill feelings”
“ill will”
presaging ill fortune
“ill omens”
“ill predictions”
“my words with inauspicious thunderings shook heaven”
“a dead and ominous silence prevailed”
“a by-election at a time highly unpropitious for the Government”
(`ill' is often used as a combining form) in a poor or improper or unsatisfactory manner; not well
“he was ill prepared”
“it ill befits a man to betray old friends”
“the car runs badly”
“he performed badly on the exam”
“the team played poorly”
“ill-fitting clothes”
“an ill-conceived plan”
combining form
with difficulty or inconvenience; scarcely or hardly
“we can ill afford to buy a new car just now”
an often persistent bodily disorder or disease; a cause for complaining
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for ill come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.