a. and sb. (UN-1 7 b.)
1837. Carlyle, Fr. Rev., I. I. iii. The … whole posthumous hope of Jesuitism now hangs by the apron of this same unmentionable Woman.
1852. Mrs. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s C., xiii. Rows of shining tin, suggestive of unmentionable good things to the appetite.
1875. Jowett, Plato (ed. 2), V. 422. If any citizen be found guilty of any great or unmentionable wrong.
absol. 1848. Mrs. Carlyle, in New Lett. & Mem. (1903), I. 242. Her tendency towards the unmentionable is too strong for me to stay it.
b. sb. pl. Trousers. (Cf. INEXPRESSIBLE B. 2.)
1830. in Thornton, Amer. Gloss. (1912), I. 478. The waist bands of his unmentionables.
1836–7. Dickens, Sk. Boz, Shabby-Genteel People. The knees of the unmentionables … began to get alarmingly while.
1883. S. C. Hall, Retrospect, II. 318. The priest’s unmentionables drying on a hedge.
Hence Unmentionableness. Also Unmentionably adv.
1870. Miss Broughton, Red as Rose, I. 157. At the rate of purity at which we are advancing, ‘legs’ will soon walk off into the limbo of silence and unmentionableness.
1879. W. Collins, Rogue’s Life, ii. He asserted, with an unmentionably vulgar oath, his resolution to turn me out of doors.
