English

Adjective

incommodious ‎(comparative more incommodious, superlative most incommodious)

1. (of a place occupied by people) Uncomfortable or inhospitable, especially due to being cramped.
   • 1859, Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, ch. 7:

     Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar . . . was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious.

   • 1909, Henry James, "Venice" in Italian Hours:

     The place is small and incommodious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted, the custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but the shabby little chapel is a palace of art.

   • 2010 June 15, Katherine Knorr, "Contemplating Art, and Its Sideshow," New York Times (retrieved 19 July 2012):

     In this they succeeded last week, despite menacing clouds and slick pavement, filling to capacity (and until past midnight) the 1937 building’s incommodious terrace with a mostly young and fairly international crowd.

2. Discomforting, inconvenient, or unsuitable.
   • 1781, Samuel Johnson, "Savage" in Lives of the Poets:

     He was sometimes so far compassionated by those who knew both his merit and distresses that they received him into their families, but they soon discovered him to be a very incommodious inmate.

   • 1859, George Eliot, Adam Bede, ch. 52:

     "What a silly you must be!" a comment which Tommy followed up by seizing Dinah with both arms, and dancing along by her side with incommodious fondness.

   • 1865, Charles Darwin, The Movement and Habits of Climbing Plants, ch. 1:

     A dense whorl of many leaves would apparently be incommodious for a twining plant.

References

• incommodious at OneLook Dictionary Search