curmudgeon

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“
Ghost Town stars Gervais as the aforementioned curmudgeon, a dentist named Bertram Pincus who hates people and goes out of his way to dodge them.

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Definitions (4)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. noun An ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions.

Toggle Century definitions Century Dictionary (1)

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Examples (45)

  • In fact, reading about Planer before meeting him in a Waterloo restaurant near his home, curmudgeon is the impression I am given; a man whose two divorces, custody struggles and therapy sessions have made him a bit of a grump.
  • Village Barbershop is an old-hat story -- curmudgeon grudgingly takes in brash youth, with eventual life-enhancing benefits for both. —  GreenCine Daily
  • Now, on to banter with a universal entity of a more intelligent nature ... w21 ... as an old curmudgeon-of-a-carpenter, I'm nothing but a layman, if that, in this arena. —  www.recordpub.com's Homepage Articles
  • Persnickety curmudgeon: Does anyone really doubt that had we subsidized town criers and scribes the media world would ... —  The Liberty Papers
  • Breathing life into an elderly curmudgeon or a purple human-like creature from the Micronesian islands, or even a self-effacing, talking jalapeno-on-a-stick, Jeff Dunham is straight man to some of the funniest partners in show business.
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Etymologies (2)

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  1. Origin unknown.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. First in this sense in the latter part of the 16th century, also spelled curmudgin; prob. a corruption (by assimilation of adjacent syllables) of cornmudgin, cornemudgin, popularly supposed to be a corruption of corn-merchant, but properly (it seems) *cornmudging, which means ‘corn-hoarding': see cornmudgin. The word thus meant orig. ‘one who withholds corn,' popularly regarded as the type of churlish avarice.
 

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/kərˈmədʒən/
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