Definition of "unpalatable"

In one corner of the room there was a huge hearth, over which hung a stock-pot, with a not altogether unpalatable odour of hot soup emanating therefrom.

1905 January 12, Baroness Orczy [i.e., Emma Orczy], The Scarlet Pimpernel, popular edition, London: Greening & Co., published 20 March 1912

She did not mean to pamper herself any longer, to go without food because her surroundings made it unpalatable.

1905, Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons

But enough of this. Homely truth is unpalatable.

1876, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Hartford, Conn.: The American Publishing Company

"This is very perplexing," said Duke Deodonato, and he knit his brows; for as he gazed upon the beauty of the damsel, it seemed to him a thing unnatural, undesirable, unpalatable, unpleasant, and unendurable, that she should wed Dr. Fusbius.

1895, Anthony Hope, Frivolous Cupid‎

A plain, seemingly graceless stylist, his rather unpalatable movies, full of rabid, sloggingly orchestrated physical pain and psychic damage, picture crime as a monstrous, miasmal evil, divesting it of any glamour it ever had.

2003, Jack Shadoian, Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, page 196

Their capacity for talking so much and saying so little is astonishing. Their verbosity is unpalatable.

2016 February 8, Marwan Bishara, “Why Obama fails the leadership test in the Middle East”, in Al Jazeera English‎

In the severer cases of hookworm the patient sometimes has an appetite for soil, paper, hair, clay, chalk, starch, and other unpalatables.

1934, Your Germs and Mine, page 295

His wife, a small woman who walked always on high heels, borrowed Gerhardie's primus stove several times a day to cook her husband gargantuan meals of cockles, mussels, snails, and other such unpalatables.

1990, Dido Davies, Andrew Davies, William Gerhardie: A Biography, page 164

Denial and disbelief tend to be the default, not a pragmatic embracing of unthinkables and unpalatables. The way things have been is not the way they are and will soon be.

2019, Paul Williams, Andreas Krebs, The Illusion of Invincibility