How to describe BAD personality traits in English
9 GREAT adjectives to use to describe personality!
We all know the usual adjectives to describe personality, like funny, pretty, kind, rude...
But when it comes to describing someone’s personality — we have a LOT of words... and sometimes the simple ones are just not the right ones.
So I’ve chosen a few VERY useful adjectives to describe people with bad or negative personality traits… and if you’re wondering what a personality trait is — it’s simply a quality or a characteristic linked to your personality (like being rude or funny, etc).
So, let’s take a look at the 8 super useful adjectives I picked for you that we regularly use in daily English. And don’t worry — I’ll also be releasing a video with adjectives to describe Good or Positive qualities too, so you will know how to describe people in more detail…no matter what you think of them!
So let’s get started on how to describe bad personality traits in English 🙂
1. Stuck-up
When someone is stuck up it means they think they are better than other people who are poorer or less popular or less powerful.
This phrase comes from the physical act of putting your nose in the air (known as “sticking your nose up in the air”), which rich, posh people used to do a lot when seeing poor people.
So someone who is stuck-up is not very friendly and not very easy to connect with. You feel like they are judging you.
I met Nathan’s girlfriend yesterday. He says she’s really nice but she seemed really stuck-up to me.
2. A snob (noun) / snobby (adj)
A snob is someone who looks down on people who are not rich or who are not part of the higher class. They actually look down on and judge people who are “socially inferior”.
In this way, this is very similar to being stuck-up. You can also be a snob when you think your tastes are better than other people’s, or that yours are just “the best”. For example, a “music snob”, when you think the type of music you like is simply better than anyone else’s taste.
I’ve never met a guy from Eton College who wasn’t a total snob.
His snobby nature will not help him make friends here.
3. Not all there
When someone is “not all there”, they are someone who is not very intelligent or slightly strange due to not functioning 100% mentally. It’s not a nice thing to say about someone to their face, and it’s used mainly as a comment or even an insult about someone.
However, people will use it to describe someone who is perhaps elderly, or older, or those who are clearly just of a lower IQ than the average.
With the way he’s always talking about aliens living on Earth, I’m not sure he’s all there.
4. Away with the fairies
When you are “away with the fairies” you are distracted, living in a dream world, or not really being 100% realistic. When I think of someone who looks like they are “away with the fairies”, I think of Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter.
She is regularly lost in her own thoughts and believes strange things that are not really based on reality. This is the kind of person we might describe as being “away with the fairies”.
She’s away with the fairies.
5. Self-conscious
This one is not so much a “negative” quality, although it can be for the person who feels this way.
When someone is self-conscious, they are not really very confident. It is quite clear that they are nervous when they talk or when they interact with others. They know people are judging what they say, how they act, or how they look.
We call this being self-conscious because the person is overly conscious of how they look or appear to other people.
For example:
Most teenagers are self-conscious when they are growing up.
6. Selfish
Someone who is selfish is only focused on what they need and want and doesn’t think about or care about other people and their wants and needs. In fact, the key is in the word — SELFish. They are only concerned with their single self and nobody else.
When you eat all the ice cream and don’t leave even one bite for me, it’s kind of selfish, don’t you think?
7. A freak (noun), freaky (adj)
Freak is a very general term. You’ll hear people use it to describe someone who says weird things or does weird things. You’ll also hear it for people who are just very different from what is “normal”, as an insult. In this clip, she uses it to say that the other one looks weird when she laughs.
Most of the time when we call someone a freak or say they are freaky, it is to say that the person is weird or scary, or someone that we don’t feel comfortable with.
He is so freaky…his hobby is collecting dead animals and stuffing them. His house gives me the creeps.
Be careful with John…. he’s a real freak. He will ask you personal questions that you don’t want to answer.
8. Proud
Usually being proud of something or someone is a good thing — after all, if you achieve something really great after working super hard, you might feel really proud of yourself, and rightly so!
However, when we describe someone as being a “proud” person in general, it’s not such a good thing.
Being proud means having an excessively high opinion of yourself or thinking you’re far more important than you really are. For this reason, proud people tend to consider themselves right all the time, and they are not likely to accept constructive criticism or self-reflect.
- She was too proud to admit that she’d made a mistake.
