Inamiable

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Not pleasant, friendly or agreeable in manner or disposition, so that others find one hard to like
2. Lacking the warmth, good humour or easy charm that makes a person pleasant to be around
3. Describing someone whose behaviour is unkind, cold or disagreeable, making them unpleasant company

Etymology: "Inamiable" is formed from the prefix "in-", meaning "not", attached to "amiable," which descends from Latin "amicabilis," meaning "friendly" or "amicable," from "amicus," "friend." The result is a negative counterpart to a word that has long described pleasantness of character, so "inamiable" simply means lacking that quality: hard to like. The word is part of a small family of near-twins. It is a piecewise doublet of "inamicable," "inimicable," "unamiable," and "unamicable," meaning that these words share the same Latin ancestry and were formed through overlapping routes, with different prefixes and endings producing similar senses. English speakers ended up with several close variants of the same negative idea, and only some of them survived in common use.