Word Finder - peevish

definition

Characterized by or exhibiting petty bad temper, bad-tempered, moody, cross.

example

I would rather figure things out on my own than ask that peevish librarian for help.

definition

Constantly complaining, whining; childishly fretful.

example

Peevish patients in the doctor's waiting room.

definition

Easily annoyed, especially by things that are not important; irritable, querulous.

definition

(adverb) Peevishly.

definition

Clever, expert.

definition

Sharp, piercing, bitter (of the wind); windy, blustery (of the weather).

definition

Perverse, refractory; headstrong, obstinate; capricious, skittish; (also) coy.

definition

Silly, senseless, foolish.

definition

Beside oneself; out of one's senses; mad.

definition

Spiteful, malignant, mischievous, harmful.

definition

Hateful, distasteful, horrid.

It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.

I think they must have been given to feeble remonstrance, getting more and more peevish as it became more and more ineffectual.

Her affection tired very soon, however, and when she grew peevish, Hindley became tyrannical.

Member for North-East Hertfordshire experienced halfway through his speech, when he became peevish about proportional representation.

His chief defect was an over-sensitiveness, leading to peevish and unreasonable behaviour in his private and official relations, to hasty and unbalanced judgments of persons and things that had given him annoyance, and to a despondency and discouragement which frustrated the great good he might have effected as a philosophic critic of public affairs.

From the heroine who is, in a phrase of Dryden's, "one of the coolest and most insignificant" heroines ever drawn, to the undignified Valens, the termagant Marcelle, and the peevish Placide, there is hardly a good character.

It was for a long time a thankless post, for St Vincent was at once half incapacitated by ill-health and very arbitrary, while Nelson, who considered that Keith's appointment was 'a personal slight to himself, was peevish and insubordinate.

And it is fair to remember in her defence that Pirkheimer when he denounced her was old, gouty and peevish, and that the immediate occasion of his outbreak against his friend's widow was a fit of anger because she had not let him have a pair of antlers - a household ornament much prized in those days - to which he fancied himself entitled out of the property left by Darer.