Dislike

How to spell dislike

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dislike

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dislike mean?

1. verbTo regard with distaste or aversion; to find unpleasant or disagreeable.
2. nounA feeling of distaste or aversion towards something.

Dislike in a sentence

• verb

  Many commuters dislike the long delays on the morning train.

• noun

  She made no secret of her dislike for crowded shopping centres.

• verb

  Most staff dislike working late on a Friday when the office is empty.

• noun

  His deep dislike of paperwork slowed the whole project down.

Where does dislike come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is a homegrown English hybrid, stitched together in the early 1500s from two very different sources. The prefix 'dis-' comes from Latin, where it carried the sense of reversal, removal, or negation; it had already entered English through many borrowed words and was being freely attached to native vocabulary. The root 'like' is thoroughly Germanic, descending from the Old English verb 'lician', meaning 'to please' or 'to be agreeable to', which in turn traces back to a word for shape or form, since something pleasing was originally something 'suitable in form'. Joining the Latin prefix to the English root produced a neat opposite, 'dislike', meaning to find disagreeable. This blend of Latin prefix and English stem is common in English, and it explains why the spelling is utterly regular: 'dis' plus 'like', with no doubled or dropped letters to trip anyone up.

How the word is built

• dis- (not, opposite of)
• like (to find agreeable)