unclubbable

English

Etymology

From un- +‎ clubbable.

Adjective

unclubbable (comparative more unclubbable, superlative most unclubbable)

1. Not suitable for membership of a club, because of a lack of social skills or conformity; unsociable. [from 18th c.]

   Antonym: clubbable

   • 1778, Frances Burney, Journals & Letters, Penguin, published 2001, page 95:

     ‘But Sir John was a most unclubable man!’

   • 1893, Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter”, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, page 212:

     It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubbable men in town.

   • 2003, Joseph Epstein, Snobbery: The American Version, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, →ISBN, page 141:

     I have to conclude that I am unclubbable. Unlike John O'Hara, who kept embossed seals of his various clubs on his gold cigarette case, I apparently take no continuing pleasure in clubs nor any real satisfaction in the thought that I have been asked to join a few of them.

   • 2012, Barbara Black, A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland, Ohio University Press, →ISBN, page 219:

     For much of the nineteenth century, conventional wisdom deemed women intractably unclubbable. The standard arguments in circulation at the time often began by pointing to women's “natural” inclination not to be social.

Further reading

• “unclubbable”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.