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Ill-defined   /ɪl-dɪfˈaɪnd/   Listen
Ill-defined

adjective
1.
Poorly stated or described.  Synonym: unclear.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Ill-defined" Quotes from Famous Books



... is bound up with the images they evoke, and is quite independent of their real significance. Words whose sense is the most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence. Such, for example, are the terms democracy, socialism, equality, liberty, &c., whose meaning is so vague that bulky volumes do not suffice to precisely fix it. Yet it is certain ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... this was neither bright nor fresh; the night having been hazy, there had been no terrestrial radiation, and the earth was dusty and parched; while the sun rose through a murky yellowish atmosphere with ill-defined orb. Thick clouds of smoke pressed upon the plains, and the faint easterly wind wafted large flakes of grass ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... children? Either by the teacher, or by conversation and reading. By the latter method the knowledge acquired is limited in extent; and as it is entirely dependent on the power of observation, the impressions received are faint and ill-defined, and the conclusions arrived at, frequently incorrect. The practice of Arithmetic might possibly be left to such teaching, inasmuch as Arithmetic is an exact science based on fixed principles, from which correct reasoning must deduce correct ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... that he maintains, over against his environment, his integrity as an individual and remains a self-determining person. It is the loss of this self-determined individuality alone that renders man completely impersonal. When individual spontaneity is feebly manifested, we speak of an ill-defined or a "passive" personality. Personality is, in short, from the objective point of view, a self-determining individual with a unique nature and a definite status in the social world ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... accumulating and disbursing ideas, and in the extent and variety of his knowledge, he exceeded Lamb, and also most of his other contemporaries; but the mind of Lamb was quite as original, and more compact. The two friends were very dissimilar, the one wandering amongst lofty, ill-defined objects, whilst the other "clung to the realities of life." It is fortunately not necessary to enter into any comparative estimate of these two remarkable persons. Each had his positive qualities and peculiarities, by which he was distinguishable ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall

... men who did succeed in getting passes out of camp, the prospect was dreary enough, dreary or undesirable. Going into town in a crowded tram is an amusement which quickly palls. Various ill-defined portions of the town, when you got there, were out of bounds, and a man had need to walk warily if he did not want ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham

... Fair Plains, and that he should probably have a better selection, he turned his steps thither. Passing out of the stable-yard he recognized the Missourian's voice in whispered conversation with the proprietor, but the two men withdrew into the shadow as he approached. An ill-defined uneasiness came over him; he knew the proprietor, who also seemed to know the Missourian, and this evident avoidance of him was significant. Perhaps his reputation as a doubtful Unionist had preceded him, but this would not account for their conduct in a district so strongly ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte

... nor avoid intercourse; their manner is therefore natural, frank, and open." "If their demeanor is often cold and serious, it is never haughty or constrained." But an "aristocratic pride is still extremely great among the English; and as the limits of aristocracy are still ill-defined, every body lives in constant dread, lest advantage should be taken of his familiarity. Unable to judge, at once, of the social position of those he meets, an Englishman prudently avoids all contact with him. Men are afraid, lest some slight service rendered should draw ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe

... which this, the main function of the flying machine, was overlooked. When the machine was considered as a method of transport, the vertical screw type, or helicopter, became at once ridiculous. It had, nevertheless, many advocates who had some vague and ill-defined notion of subsequent motion through the air after ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell

... generally, where Alexander Crandall's farm lay; and, shortly after, drove through the village and mounted the road over which plied the Stenton stage. In the Bottom, beyond the east range, he went to the right and passed over an ill-defined way with numerous and deep fords. It was afternoon; an even, sullen expanse of cloud hid the deeps of sky through which the sun moved like a newly-minted silver dollar. A sharp wind drew through the opening; the fallen leaves rose ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... probably of very primitive origin, arising from the association of a group with its habitat, whose food supply they regard as a monopoly.[83] This is true even of migratory hunting tribes. They claim a certain area whose boundaries, however, are often ill-defined and subject to fluctuations, because the lands are not held by permanent occupancy and cultivation. An exceptional case is that of the Shoshone Indians, inhabiting the barren Utah basin and the upper valleys of the Snake and Salmon Rivers, who are accredited ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... Eastern situation was ill-defined and full of difficulties. Mr. Goschen, before he left England on his mission, came to Dilke to 'bewail the unwillingness of Gladstone and of Lord Granville to make up their minds how far they were going in the direction of coercion of ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn

... each centre of urban life, whether it be Chelsea, Whitechapel, or the Borough,—that ill-defined centre south of London Bridge,—was closely identified with local conditions which were no part of the life of any other section. Aside from the varying conditions of social life, or whether the section was purely residential, or whether it was a manufacturing community, there ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... cold, pinched, hungry ones, eager, earnest, pathetic and joyous, worn and weary, burdened and care-free, they again passed before him, misty and ill-defined, as though the snow still veiled and made them hazy, and none of them he knew. He wished they would stop passing. He was very tired. They, too, were tired. Would they for ever be passing before him, these people, these little children, he had seen to-day? If they would go away he could think ...
— How It Happened • Kate Langley Bosher

... finally to collapse under the overpowering grasp of a single Dictator or Despot, whose centralized system in the main, still survives; having also seen how the nucleus of China proper was encompassed on three sides by Tibetans, Tartars, Tunguses, Coreans, and by various ill-defined tribes to the south; let us see if there is any evidence whatever to show, or even to suggest to us, whence the orthodox Chinese originally came, ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker

... she was mistaken. The one whom she thought she had seen existed no longer, never had existed. It was a spectre seen in the limbo of another world, in the darkness of a half light. And she continued to walk, retaining of this ill-defined meeting an impression of coldness, of vague embarrassment, and of pain ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... of $15,000,000 paid for it was considered exorbitant by those who were opposed to the purchase in 1803, yet the possibilities of the country, then so vague and ill-defined, so amply justified the prophetic faith of its advocates that a century later many millions of dollars in excess of the purchase money were spent in commemorating the transfer of a tract of land without which the present greatness of the United States would not ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... ultimately different right down to its essential relationships from the human past. But they also believe that the forces that have been assailing and disintegrating the Normal Social Life, which have been, on the one hand, producing great accumulations of wealth, private freedom, and ill-defined, irresponsible and socially dangerous power, and, on the other, labour hordes, for the most part urban, without any property or outlook except continuous toil and anxiety, which in England have substituted a dischargeable agricultural labourer for the independent peasant ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... and appendages; in Molluscs the muscles are attached to the skin and the shell, and the nervous system consists of separate masses; Articulates have a hard external skeleton and jointed limbs, and their nervous system consists of two long ventral cords; Radiates have ill-defined nervous and muscular systems, and in their lowest forms possess the animal functions without the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... marvellous but tardy simplifications which the union of Europe and the democratic federation of the continent will some day bring forth, what will be in France, the form of the social edifice, of whose ill-defined and luminous outlines the thinking man already has a glimpse, through the ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo

... the invocation of justice. Justice is not the work of the law: on the contrary, the law is only a declaration and application of JUSTICE in all circumstances where men are liable to come in contact. If, then, the idea that we form of justice and right were ill-defined, if it were imperfect or even false, it is clear that all our legislative applications would be wrong, our institutions vicious, our politics erroneous: consequently there would ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... subjects ill-disposed to accede to his cowardly submission; and fifteen years later the claim founded on this special act of submission was formally renounced for a sum of 10,000 merks by Richard I., who was eager to raise money for his Crusade. Such was the ill-defined position of this ancient controversy, when fate seemed to fling into Edward's hands the opportunity of defining it anew with all the clearness dear to his legal mind. It was easy for him to secure a recognition of his superiority from the selfish and eager candidates for the crown, and meantime he ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various

... confusedly in our memory, and are recalled by the appearance of such real objects as in any respect correspond to the phantoms they presented to our imagination? How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness that neither the scene, the speakers, nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place! It is even so with me while I gaze upon ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... "instinct" is very vague and ill-defined. It is commonly employed to denote any action, or even feeling, which is not dictated by conscious reasoning, whether it is, or is not, the result of previous experience. It is "instinct" which leads a chicken just hatched to pick up a grain of corn; ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley

... certain ill-defined tales to the effect that this tribe once lived about Lake Buluan, and one writer[72] has attempted to show that the tribal name is derived from that early home. Today they are still in considerable numbers ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole

... feeling which is suggested by the differences with some of his closest friends. There was a lurking distrust of Mr. Webster's sincerity. We can see it plainly in the correspondence of the Western Whigs, who were not, perhaps, wholly impartial. But it existed, nevertheless. There was a vague, ill-defined feeling of doubt in the public mind; a suspicion that the spirit of the advocate was the ruling spirit in Mr. Webster, and that he did not believe with absolute and fervent faith in one side of any question. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge

... to slip from his tongue; he hesitated. For the last two days he had been living in a dream, among a rapid succession of strange, ill-defined events which left behind them no precise memory, as a man starts, half-awakened, from a slumber peopled with fantastic visions. It was true, doubtless, he believed he had seen Honore lying upon a cannon, dead, but he would not have cared to swear to it; what use is there in afflicting ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... sister of Forster's, partly because of frays that had arisen between his herdsmen and those of the Bairds, for his cattle wandered far and wide on the mountain slopes to the south, and sometimes passed the ill-defined line, beyond which the Bairds regarded the country as their own. Jedburgh was but ten miles away, Hawick but six or seven, and any stay after the sun rose would speedily have brought strong bodies of men from these ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty

... of December 1791, the ill-defined disease under which he had for some time laboured, ended in his dissolution; and subsequent examination showed that inflammation of the brain had taken place. He felt that he was dying—"The taste of death," he said to his sister-in-law, "is already on my tongue—I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... appearance of such real objects as in any respect correspond to the phantoms they presented to our imagination? How often do we find ourselves in society which we have never before met, and yet feel impressed with a mysterious and ill-defined consciousness, that neither the scene, the speakers, nor the subject are entirely new; nay, feel as if we could anticipate that part of the conversation which has not yet taken place! It is even so with me while I gaze upon that ruin; nor can I divest myself of the idea, that ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... instances do occur in which it was. There were very few towns in the reign of Charles II. that had not got their commons attached to them; but outside and beyond these patches of cultivation round the towns the country was open, unenclosed, and the boundaries ill-defined. The king's highway ran from one point to another, but its course was very wide. Roads were not then macadamised and strictly confined to one line. The want of metalling, and the consequent fearful ruts and sloughs, drove vehicles and travellers further and further ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies

... day that neither the sheriff, the wapentake, nor the justice of the quorum could exercise their functions as they did then. There was in the England of the past a certain confusion of powers, whose ill-defined attributes resulted in their overstepping their real bounds at times—a thing which would be impossible in the present day. The usurpation of power by police and justices has ceased. We believe that even the word "wapentake" has changed its meaning. It implied a magisterial ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... boundaries of the territory thus ceded by France were ill-defined, and, in fact, unknown. The French negotiator who conferred with Monroe and Livingston, declared a large portion of the country transferred to be no better known at the time "than when Columbus landed at the Bahamas." There was no way by which accurate metes and bounds ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... powers of the day. It is not easy in imagination to thrust back the present leading empires of the earth into the contracted spheres of their not remote past. But to feel how a little confederacy of seven provinces loosely tied together by an ill-defined treaty could hold so prominent and often so controlling a place in the European system of the seventeenth century, we must remember that there was then no Germany, no Russia, no Italy, no United States of America, scarcely ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... heeded—that to bring any matter connected with pressing to judicial trial would be "very imprudent." Later, with the lesson of twenty-two years' hard pressing before their eyes, they went still further, for they then advised that a subject so contentious, not to say so ill-defined in law, should be kept, if not altogether, at least as much as possible out of court. [Footnote: Admiralty Records 7. 298—Law Officers' Opinions, 1733-56, No. 99; Admiralty Records 7. 299—Law Officers' ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... labor is used, thirdly, in a more restricted, very popular and current, but very ill-defined way, to designate a limited sub-group among those who live by contributing productive efforts to the work of society. Every one is a laborer who is not a person of leisure. Public men, or other workers, if any, who labor but ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner

... sense of Mr. McLennan, who introduced totemism to science. Thus, to speak of 'sex-totems,' or to call the protecting animal of each individual a 'totem,' is, I fear, to bring in confusion, and to justify Mr. Max Muller's hard opinion that 'totemism' is ill-defined. For myself, I use the term in the strict sense which I have given, and in ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... and unapproachable, set up by my own husband. Set up and acted upon by him. How could I ever attain it or anything near it? Should I not be constantly shocking him by coarse, gross notions as to the needlessness of this or that fine point of conduct? by my ill-defined ideas as to a code of honor—my slovenly ways of looking ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... quickly that neither spoke; they caught their breath and waited in suspense. A shadow, dim, ill-defined, seemed to take ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish

... seem to have belonged to three different types. The most important were the Semites, who spoke a dialect akin to Armenian, Hebrew and Phoenician. Side by side with these the monuments give evidence of a race of ill-defined character, whom we provisionally call Sumerians, who came, it is said, from some northern country, and brought with them a curious system of writing which, adopted by ten different nations, has preserved for us all that we know in regard to the majority of the empires which rose and fell in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... the point of view of a geologist. He ranges over a wide field, and appeals in support to writers of acknowledged ability in all branches of learning. Yet the impression we gather from his writings is that of ill-defined, but far-reaching antiquity, one necessary to account for the great climatic and geographical changes which he shows us have taken place since the Glacial Age. But he tells us that any term of years he could suggest would be ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... look at the dark girl. The diamond eyes were still upon her. She put her kerchief to her forehead, which had grown slightly moist; she sighed once, almost shivered, for she felt cold; then, following some ill-defined impulse, which she could not resist, she left her place and went to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... constitutional President with strictly limited powers, bound by usage and precedent. For him to have kept his seat by military force, in defiance of a Democratic majority, would have been an act of treason. But the Lord Protector held a new office, unknown to the old constitution of England and with ill-defined powers. A revolution had tossed him to the top and made him dictator. He was bound to keep the peace in unsettled times, to keep out the Stuarts, to keep down the unruly factions. If Parliament would not help, he must govern without it. Carlyle thought ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers

... drew from, his pocket a letter, and handed it to Edith. With a flushed face and a rapidly throbbing heart Edith took the letter. It seemed like that for which she had been so long waiting, but at the same time there was a certain ill-defined apprehension on her mind of disappointment. Had that letter come through any other channel, it would have excited nothing but unmingled joy; but the channel was suspicions, and Edith did not yet believe that he had really been to Plympton Terrace. She suspected some new piece of acting, ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille

... willingness to believe that Mlle. d' Armilly had been deceived with regard to the identity of the beggar and, in her confusion, had confounded him with some one else, Zuleika could not altogether shake off a feeling of vague apprehension, of ill-defined terror when she thought over the singular conduct and wild agitation of the former music-teacher in the quiet and solitude of her own chamber. Why had Mlle. d' Armilly been so stricken at the sight of the mendicant? Why had she so earnestly entreated her to say nothing of what had ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg

... has it been, for the most part, a theme for passionate declamation, rather than of severe analysis or of protracted and patient investigation. In the warm praises of the philosopher, no less than in the glowing inspirations of the poet, it often stands before us as a vague and ill-defined something which all men are required to worship, but which no man is bound to understand. It would seem, indeed, as if it were a mighty something not to be clearly seen, but only to be deeply felt. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... request was followed by one of those outbreaks, during which he would be profane, abusive, destructive and violent, threatening to kill the officials who had anything to do with his safe-keeping, and would elaborate an ill-defined general paranoid trend towards them. He was simply persecuted by a bunch of unchristian anarchists who were running this place; that they would see him in hell first before they would make him behave himself; that he is not here to please anybody except himself; that he recognizes ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... sustaining faith, although, occupied by the immediate problems of amelioration, they left it rather vague and ill-defined. The word itself is seldom pronounced in their writings. The idea is treated as subordinate to the other ideas in the midst of which it had grown up: Reason, Nature, Humanity, Illumination (lumieres). It has not ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... as pale phosphorescent figures of ill-defined outline, lost in their own halos, as it were. I could ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... or rather that of the sun's equator. The apparent angular distance of its vertex from the sun varies, according to circumstances, from 40 deg. to 90 deg., and the breadth of its base perpendicular to its axis from 8 deg. to 30 deg. It is extremely faint and ill-defined, at least in this climate, though better seen in tropical regions, but cannot be mistaken for any atmospheric meteor or aurora borealis. It is manifestly in the nature of a lenticularly-formed envelope surrounding the sun, and extending beyond the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... discredit, nothing which could have justified him in interfering, even if interference could have prevailed. The two had fallen in love with one another, and, the man not being visibly bad, the marriage had come about; was there more to say? And yet Rainham's ill-defined uneasiness still questioned and explored. A hundred little episodes in his friendship with the brilliant young painter, dismissed as of no import at the time, returned to him—instances, as it seemed now to his morbid imagination, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... first half of July, my colleagues and I at Berlin did not live in a fool's paradise. As the deceptive calm caused by Vienna's silence was prolonged, a latent, ill-defined uneasiness took hold of us more and more. Yet we were far from anticipating that in the space of a few days we should be driven into the midst of a diplomatic maelstrom, in which, after a week of intense anguish, we should look on, mute and helpless, at the shipwreck ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... relation to the siege of Calvi; for it makes it probable that, in attributing to himself a much more important part at Bastia, and in saying that Hood's report had put him unfairly in the background, he was not exaggerating his actual though ill-defined position there. That Nelson loved to dwell in thought upon his own achievements, that distinction in the eyes of his fellows was dear to him, that he craved recognition, and was at times perhaps too insistent in requiring it, is true enough; but there ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... the name of an object which would be familiar only to brewers and bakers, probably suffered from the discontinuance of family brewing and baking. It would no longer be familiar, and may possibly have felt the blurring effect of the ill-defined BALM, which word also seems rarely used. In the South of England few persons now ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges

... side in every respect women, as one might draw a line between goats and sheep. Many women have a considerable amount of "maleness"; numerous men have distinct feminine characteristics, physical and mental. There is thus an ill-defined "intermediate sex," as Edward Carpenter called it, whose size has been kept down by sexual selection; or better stated there is so much overlapping that it is a question of different averages with many individuals of each ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... pacification, but in favor of it according to the Constitution. The Constitution embraces all that any State can reasonably ask or honorably concede. But if from change of circumstances or other causes, the men of the South are of the opinion that their interests are overlooked or ill-defined, I, for one, will favor a call of a convention to consider amendments to the Constitution, and I will vote for such amendments as shall give as substantial protection to the South as the North ought to ask for, in the change ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... trembling a little in sympathy with any considerable shock of earthquake that came to move that portion of the round globe from her sleep. Of this they knew as little, no doubt, as they did of the ill-defined line of demarcation between experiences that are objective, capable of being weighed and measured, and those that are subjective, taking place—though with convincing authority—only in ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... way as a dream transforms according to its nature, the incidents of sleep, so the soul converts into psychical phenomena the ill-defined impressions of the organism. An uncomfortable attitude becomes nightmare; an atmosphere charged with storm becomes moral torment. Not mechanically and by direct causality; but imagination and conscience engender, according to their own nature, analogous effects; they ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... group of two or three individuals whose interaction forms the whole business of the book. There is no local colour in it, no complexity of detail nor violence of contrast; the atmosphere is vague and neutral, the action passes among ill-defined sitting-rooms, and the most poignant scene in the story takes place upon a staircase which has never been described. Thus the reader of modern novels is inevitably struck, in A Simple Story, by a sense of emptiness and thinness, which may well blind him to ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... were rigorously concealed from us, and I never learnt what they really were even in later days. So I will not attempt to speak of them. We were soon aware of the bare fact that he was in Paris, exercising public functions which were somewhat ill-defined as yet; and on the evening of the 31st my mother informed us that we were going to join him at the Palais-Royal. [Footnote: It is not for me to pass judgment on my father's conduct in accepting the crown in 1830. There is no doubt the July Revolution was a great misfortune. It gave a fresh ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... see the Miss Lapidoth who had gone through so much, and was "capable of submitting to anything in the form of duty." For Gwendolen had remembered nearly every word that Deronda had said about Mirah, and especially that phrase, which she repeated to herself bitterly, having an ill-defined consciousness that her own submission was something very different. She would have been obliged to allow, if any one had said it to her, that what she submitted to could not take the shape of duty, but was submission to a yoke drawn ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... strong, southeast; thermometer 66 Fahr. Taking a favorable position near the mass, as they slowly crawled from the ground, up the blades of grass and stems of clover and small weeds, we noted, first, that they seemed dazed, without any method in their movements, save an ill-defined impression that they must go somewhere. Again, they were pushed forward, usually by those coming after them, which seemed to add to their confusion. As a brood or colony of insects, their every movement indicated that they were wholly ill ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... contained reticences and obscurities, which were fertile in pretexts for war and in unfriendly interpretations. The First Consul wished to secure an interval of rest and leisure, to consolidate his conquests at home and abroad. He had not renounced the glorious and ill-defined project of the imperial government which he affected to exercise over Europe. "If England made a new coalition," he wrote to M. Otto, "the only result would be a renewal of the history of the ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt

... erythematosum) begins as one or more small or large, irregularly outlined hyperaemic macules or patches, with or without slight or marked swelling, and with more or less itching or burning. At first it may be ill-defined, but it tends to spread and its features to become more pronounced. It may be limited to a certain region, or it may be more or less general. When fully developed, the skin is harsh and dry, of a mottled, reddish or violaceous color, thickened, infiltrated and usually ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon

... us, wonderful partitions of empires and kingdoms; those loose and ill-defined rules of succession in Germany, France, England, and elsewhere; productive of revolution at the death of every sovereign, and often during every reign, showed the Popes that hereditary rights ought to be clear and fixed, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... the reflective and the imaginative very much outweight the perceptive. Men to whom this kind of an organization has been given generally have active minds, but their minds never present anything clearly. To their mental vision all is ill-defined, chaotic. They see everything in a haze. Whether such men talk or write, they are verbose, illogical, intangible, will-o'-the-wispish. Their thoughts are phantomlike; like shadows, they continually escape their grasp. In their ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... hard to draw the line, for vices and virtues tread somewhat closely on each other's heels. The division between prudence and cowardice is often ill-defined. The love that rushes into poverty that it is not strong enough to endure, has in it an element of the selfishness that makes another sit still in comfort while the path is being made smooth for her ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux

... ill-defined, nebulous way did he feel that it was the girl who had come into his life that caused him for the first time to feel shame for his past deeds. He did not know the meaning of love, and so he could not know that ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... through future time. If, as the ancients supposed, the flat earth was surrounded by an impassable breadth of water, or by deserts heated to an intolerable excess, who would not look at these last boundaries to man's knowledge with deep but ill-defined sensations? ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin



Words linked to "Ill-defined" :   well-defined, unclear



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