ILL-USAGE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does ill-usage mean? 

• ILL-USAGE (noun)
  The noun ILL-USAGE has 1 sense:

1. cruel or inhumane treatment

  Familiarity information: ILL-USAGE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ILL-USAGE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Cruel or inhumane treatment

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

abuse; ill-treatment; ill-usage; maltreatment

Context example:

the child showed signs of physical abuse

Hypernyms ("ill-usage" is a kind of...):

mistreatment (the practice of treating (someone or something) badly)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "ill-usage"):

child abuse (the physical or emotional or sexual mistreatment of children)

child neglect (failure of caretakers to provide adequate emotional and physical care for a child)

persecution (the act of persecuting (especially on the basis of race or religion))

cruelty; inhuman treatment (a cruel act; a deliberate infliction of pain and suffering)

Derivation:

ill-use (treat badly)

 Context examples 

I went over the fields too—(speaking in a tone of great ill-usage,) which made it so much the worse.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

No ill-usage so brands its record on my feelings.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

He spoke in a slow staccato fashion, choosing his words with care, and gave the impression generally of a man of learning and letters who had had ill-usage at the hands of fortune.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

All the feuds of countless generations, all the hatreds and cruelties of their narrow history, all the memories of ill-usage and persecution were to be purged that day.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

She had loved, she did love still, and she had all the suffering which a warm temper and a high spirit were likely to endure under the disappointment of a dear, though irrational hope, with a strong sense of ill-usage.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

We are not on friendly terms, and it always gives me pain to meet him, but I have no reason for avoiding him but what I might proclaim before all the world, a sense of very great ill-usage, and most painful regrets at his being what he is.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

Stanley Hopkins led us first to the house, where he introduced us to a haggard, grey-haired woman, the widow of the murdered man, whose gaunt and deep-lined face, with the furtive look of terror in the depths of her red-rimmed eyes, told of the years of hardship and ill-usage which she had endured.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Mrs. Bennet, to whose apartment they all repaired, after a few minutes' conversation together, received them exactly as might be expected; with tears and lamentations of regret, invectives against the villainous conduct of Wickham, and complaints of her own sufferings and ill-usage; blaming everybody but the person to whose ill-judging indulgence the errors of her daughter must principally be owing.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

Harriet expressed herself very much as might be supposed, without reproaches, or apparent sense of ill-usage; and yet Emma fancied there was a something of resentment, a something bordering on it in her style, which increased the desirableness of their being separate.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

The room was most dear to her, and she would not have changed its furniture for the handsomest in the house, though what had been originally plain had suffered all the ill-usage of children; and its greatest elegancies and ornaments were a faded footstool of Julia's work, too ill done for the drawing-room, three transparencies, made in a rage for transparencies, for the three lower panes of one window, where Tintern Abbey held its station between a cave in Italy and a moonlight lake in Cumberland, a collection of family profiles, thought unworthy of being anywhere else, over the mantelpiece, and by their side, and pinned against the wall, a small sketch of a ship sent four years ago from the Mediterranean by William, with H.M.S. Antwerp at the bottom, in letters as tall as the mainmast.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)