mistrustful

mistrust +‎ -ful

mistrustful (comparative more mistrustful, superlative most mistrustful)

1. Having mistrust, lacking trust (in someone or something).
   • c. 1590, William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3, Act IV, Scene 2,

     […] I hold it cowardice

     To rest mistrustful where a noble heart

     Hath pawn’d an open hand in sign of love;

   • 1910, Ian Hay, The Right Stuff, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Book Two, Chapter Sixteen, p. 284,

     In the passage I met the nurse. She greeted me with a little smile; but I was mistrustful of professional cheerfulness that night.

2. Expressing or showing a lack of trust.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, London: William Ponsonbie, Book III, Canto 12, p. 579,

     He lookt askew with his mistrustfull eyes,

     And nycely trode, as thornes lay in his way

   • 1847, Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, London: Smith, Elder & Co., Volume I, Chapter 10, p. 160,

     At last, having held a document before her glasses for nearly five minutes, she presented it across the counter; accompanying the act by another inquisitive and mistrustful glance—it was for J. E.

   • 1908, Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Chapter 2,

     He led the way to the stable-yard accordingly, the Rat following with a most mistrustful expression […]

3. Having a suspicion, imagining or supposing (that something undesirable is the case).
   • 1859, Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book 2, Chapter 15,

     The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mistrustful of having made a mistake in his late demonstrations; but no.

4. (obsolete) Causing mistrust, suspicions, or forebodings.
   • 1582, Richard Stanihurst (translator), Thee First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis, Leiden: John Pates, Book 3, p. 60

     Vp we gad, owt spredding oure sayls and make to the seaward:

     Al creeks mistrustful with Greekish countrye refusing.

   • 1593 William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis,

     […] stonish’d as night-wanderers often are,

     Their light blown out in some mistrustful wood,

     Even so confounded in the dark she lay,

     Having lost the fair discovery of her way.

• (having mistrust): distrustful, suspicious, untrusting, wary

• mistrustfully (adv)
• mistrustfulness (n)

• mistrustful in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913.