Adjacent Words

Crabbed definitions

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Webster's 1828 Dictionary

CRABBED, a. [from crab.]
1. Rough; harsh; austere; sour; peevish; morose; cynical; applied to the temper.
2. Rough; harsh; applied to things.
3. Difficult; perplexing; as a crabbed author or subject.

WordNet (r) 3.0 (2005)

adj
1: annoyed and irritable [syn: crabbed, crabby, cross, fussy, grouchy, grumpy, bad-tempered, ill- tempered]

Merriam Webster's

adjective Etymology: Middle English, partly from crabbe crustacean, partly from crabbe crab apple Date: 14th century 1. marked by a forbidding moroseness <a crabbed view of human nature> 2. difficult to read or understand <crabbed handwriting> Synonyms: see sullen • crabbedness noun

Oxford Reference Dictionary

adj. 1 irritable or morose. 2 (of handwriting) ill-formed and hard to decipher. 3 perverse or cross-grained. 4 difficult to understand. Derivatives: crabbedly adv. crabbedness n. Etymology: ME f. CRAB(1), assoc. with CRAB(2)

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Crabbed Crab"bed (kr?b"b?d), a. [See Crab,n.] 1. Characterized by or manifesting, sourness, peevishness, or moroseness; harsh; cross; cynical; -- applied to feelings, disposition, or manners. Crabbed age and youth can not live together. --Shak. 2. Characterized by harshness or roughness; unpleasant; -- applied to things; as, a crabbed taste. 3. Obscure; difficult; perplexing; trying; as, a crabbed author. ``Crabbed eloquence.'' --Chaucer. How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose. --Milton. 4. Cramped; irregular; as, crabbed handwriting. -- Crab"bed*ly, adv. -- Crab"bed*ness, n.

Soule's Dictionary of English Synonyms

a. 1. Sour, tart, rough, acrid. 2. Morose, surly, testy, touchy, cross, growling, snarling, snappish, cantankerous, waspish, petulant, peevish, churlish, harsh, acrimonious, caustic, captious, censorious, splenetic, out of sorts, ill-tempered. 3. Difficult, perplexing, trying, unmanageable, tough, intractable, hard to deal with.

1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

Sour, ill-tempered, difficult.

Moby Thesaurus

Byzantine, acerb, acerbate, acerbic, acescent, anile, balled up, bearish, beyond one, bitchy, blunt, brusque, cankered, cantankerous, choleric, churlish, complex, complicated, confounded, confused, convoluted, crab, cramp, cranky, cross, cross-grained, crusty, cussed, daedal, debilitated, decrepit, devious, difficult, disagreeable, doddered, doddering, doddery, dour, dry, elaborate, embrangled, entangled, excitable, feeble, feisty, fossilized, fouled up, fractious, garbled, gerontal, gerontic, gloomy, glum, green, gruff, hard, hard to understand, huffish, huffy, implicated, infirm, intricate, involuted, involved, irascible, irritable, jumbled, knotted, knotty, labyrinthian, labyrinthine, loused up, many-faceted, matted, mazy, mean, meandering, messed up, mixed up, morose, mossbacked, moth-eaten, mucked up, multifarious, mummylike, obfuscated, obscure, obscured, ornery, overtechnical, palsied, papery-skinned, perplexed, perverse, pickled, pungent, ramified, ravaged with age, rickety, roundabout, run to seed, rusty, saturnine, scrambled, screwed up, sec, senile, shaky, shriveled, snappish, snarled, sour, sour as vinegar, soured, sourish, spiteful, spleeny, splenetic, stricken in years, subtle, sulky, surly, tangled, tangly, tart, tartish, testy, timeworn, tottering, tottery, tough, twisted, ugly, unripe, unsweet, unsweetened, vinegarish, vinegary, waspish, weak, withered, wizened