Loading page
say it: uhn-ROO-lee
unruly is an adjective meaning "noisy and lacking in restraint or discipline". It is pronounced /ənˈɹuli/ — uhn-ROO-lee. It carries 3 recorded senses.
noisy and lacking in restraint or discipline
“a boisterous crowd”
“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”
incapable of being controlled
“the little boy's parents think he is spirited, but his teacher finds him unruly”
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 unruly 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.