Today’s word of the Day is:
What It Means
A cantankerous person is often angry and annoyed. Cantankerous also means “difficult or irritating to deal with.”
Example: Several sportswriters cited the coach’s cantankerous personality as a reason for the team’s poor performance and lack of motivation.
Other Words from cantankerous
cantankerously adverb
cantankerousness noun
Synonyms & Antonyms
Synonyms
- acid,
- bearish,
- bilious,
- bloody-minded
- disagreeable,
- dyspeptic,
- ill-humored,
- ill-natured,
- ill-tempered,
- ornery,
- splenetic,
- surly
Antonyms
- amiable,
- good-humored,
- good-natured,
- good-tempered
The Origin of Cantankerous Is Mysterious
Cantankerous people are cranky: they’re grumpy and angry and if we think charitably about them for a moment we might consider that they possibly suffer from a health affliction that sours the mood. It’s been speculated that cantankerous is a product of the Middle English contack, meaning “contention,” under the influence of a pair of words: rancorous and cankerous. Rancorous brings the anger and “bitter deep-seated ill will” (as rancor can be understood to mean). And cankerous brings the perhaps understandable foul mood: a cankerous person suffers from painful sores—that is, cankers.
Examples of cantankerous in a Sentence
Contemporaries often found him aloof, standoffish, and cantankerous and his mannerisms and diction inscrutable.
Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books, 22 Oct. 2009
In his last years, Harriman was the kind of cantankerous old man who once berated a financial planner by threatening to make him sit in the corner and wear a dunce cap.
Bryan Burrough, Vanity Fair, January 1995
There are those who contend the hockey maven is a cantankerous old coot—rife with unpopular opinions and quick to assert them
Rick Harrison, Newsday, 19 Sept. 2004