Meaning & use
unpleasant experience
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Meanings
phrasecountable
something that happens to you and makes you feel bad, uncomfortable, or upset.
Grammar: Countable: use 'an' before it in the singular and 'experiences' in the plural.
Patterns
- an unpleasant experience for someone
- have an unpleasant experience
- an unpleasant experience with something
Waiting three hours at the airport was an unpleasant experience.
She had an unpleasant experience with that dentist, so she changed clinics.
Losing the match was an unpleasant experience for the whole team.
phraseuncountable
the state of going through something difficult or upsetting, considered as a whole.
Grammar: Used without 'a' or a plural when you talk about the general idea: 'a lot of unpleasant experience'.
Patterns
- a lot of unpleasant experience
- years of unpleasant experience
The job gave him a lot of unpleasant experience with angry customers.
After years of unpleasant experience in that office, she finally left.
Word forms
| plural | unpleasant experiences |
|---|
Common combinations
- a thoroughly unpleasant experience
- The whole interview was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
- a rather unpleasant experience
- Moving house turned out to be a rather unpleasant experience.
- have an unpleasant experience
- Many tourists have an unpleasant experience with taxi drivers here.
- an unpleasant experience for someone
- The accident was an unpleasant experience for everyone involved.
- recover from an unpleasant experience
- It took her a month to recover from that unpleasant experience.
Synonyms and how they differ
- bad experience
- More informal and vaguer; 'unpleasant experience' sounds slightly more careful and formal.
- ordeal
- Much stronger: an ordeal is long and very hard to bear, while an unpleasant experience may be brief and mild.
- setback
- Focuses on a problem that delays progress, not on how the situation felt.
Opposites
Word family
- unpleasant adjective
- not nice or enjoyable; the adjective that forms this phrase.
- unpleasantly adverb
- in a way that is not nice or enjoyable.
- unpleasantness noun
- the quality of being unpleasant, or an unpleasant situation.
Commonly confused: unpleasant experience or unpleasant person?
unpleasant experience vs unpleasant person
An unpleasant experience is a situation; an unpleasant person is someone whose behavior you dislike. Do not use 'experience' when you mean a human being.
Practice
Which sentence uses the phrase correctly?
Choose one answer.
In the singular, the countable phrase needs the article 'an' before the vowel sound: 'an unpleasant experience'. Option A uses 'a' before a vowel sound, option C drops the article in a singular countable use, and option D wrongly uses 'the' with a plural.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “unpleasant experience”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.