inclement

adj

1. Stormy, of rough weather; not clement.

   “inclement weather”

   “Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms / Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky; / Save on that side which from the wall of Heaven, / Though distant far, some small reflection gains / Of glimmering air less vexed with tempest loud.”

   “How much more, if we pray him, will his ear / Be open, and his heart to pitie incline, / And teach us further by what means to shun / Th’ inclement Seasons, Rain, Ice, Hail and Snow, / Which now the Skie with various Face begins.”

   “The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.”

   “Concerning all this, it is much to be deplored that the mast-heads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow’s-nests, in which the look-outs of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of the frozen seas.”

2. (obsolete)Merciless, unrelenting.

   “He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there, sucking his own paws; so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom!”

   “By some paradoxical evolution rancour and intolerance have been established in the vanguard of primitive Christianity. Mrs. Spoker, in common with many of the stricter disciples of righteousness, was as inclement in demeanour as she was cadaverous in aspect.”

3. (archaic)Unmercifully severe in temper or action.