unready
/ʌnˈrɛdi
/adjective
1Not prepared for a situation or activity: she was young and unready for motherhood...
- Built in Glasgow in 1910, this vessel tramped her way around the globe for the next three decades, until she was requisitioned by an Admiralty hurriedly preparing for a war it was desperately unready to fight.
- Despite his ten billion years of preparation, he found himself to be unready.
- Although his previous sailing experience was limited, his boat unready and the electronic gadgetry of his own design unfinished and untested, Crowhurst had managed to persuade everyone to regard him as a serious contender.
1.1 archaic Slow to act; hesitant: [as name]: Ethelred the Unready...
- Athelstane's nickname was the Unready - not coward or lazy, but unready, and slow to act, even in the name of his Saxon heritage.
- It is a huge story, full of facts, and Fraser spurns equivocation and doubt as she explains why Alfred was great and Ethelred was unready, why King John was not a good man and Nelson and Wellington were brilliant.
- His attempts to buy off Viking invaders gave him the name, Ethelred the Unready.
Derivatives
unreadiness
- The state of national unreadiness for the long-predicted onset of hurricane-season activity has been bluntly reported as the outcome of the exercise put on at the office of the National Emergency Management Authority (Nema).
- We maintained our position for some time for fear of people's unreadiness for the direct presidential election.
- If critics are right and the plan was to use £500,000 of Scottish taxpayers' funds secure in the knowledge that Ireland's unreadiness would scupper our chances, it worked perfectly.