Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Tending to take offense with slight cause; oversensitive.
- adj. Requiring special tact or skill in handling; delicate: a touchy situation.
- adj. Highly sensitive to touch. Used of a body part.
- adj. Easily ignited; flammable.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Apt to take offense on slight provocation; irritable; irascible; peevish; testy: tetchy.
- In decorative art, made up of small points, broken lines, or touches, and not drawn in a firm unbroken line, as the outline of any pattern.
Wiktionary
- adj. of a situation Extremely sensitive or volatile; easily disturbed to the point of becoming unstable; requiring caution or tactfulness.
- adj. of a person Easily offended; oversensitive; ticklish.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. colloq. Peevish; irritable; irascible; techy; apt to take fire.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. difficult to handle; requiring great tact
- adj. quick to take offense
Etymologies
- From touch + -y (Wiktionary)
Examples
“BENNETT: It is an interesting thing about Huckabee, what you called touchy feely.”
“This has never happened to me in touchy Chiapas or Oaxaca or even very touchy Mexico City.”
“A Ph.D. in statistics and a onetime professor, he is data-driven, quirky, and not at all what Dr. Phil might describe as touchy-feely.”
“Sex has notoriously been a difficult, dare we say "touchy," subject to discuss, so for generations there have been guidebooks about human sexuality such as the classic "Our Bodies Our Selves.”
“But Gates wanted to talk about a kind of touchy-feely subject trust.”
“Readers, patients and health-care professionals, I'd love to hear from you on this "touchy" subject and publish both sides of the stethoscope!”
“McCain describing Obama as "touchy" and "angry" made me think of Nixon lecturing the White House staff after he resigned about not being petty and never hating your opponents, with a complete lack of self-awareness.”
“It wasn't your pointing out that 48/43 was "within the margin of error" of 50/50 that I labelled "touchy"; it was you going off on "juvenile" Obama supporters.”
“Democrats are kind of touchy about stolen elections.”
CQ: Clinton On Track For Only A Small Delegate Win In Pennsylvania
“I'm not a "touchy" person to begin with, and I intensely dislike having strangers holding my hands and putting their arms around me.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘touchy’.
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Y
What a -Y does to an otherwise common, dull word
zany, waxy, wavy, arty, chewy, bony, boxy, cozy, nosy, foxy, wiry, junky and 321 more...
-
If You Can't Say Anything Nice
Negative attributes or actions.
biased, cantankerous, caustic, contumacious, dilatory, disdain, duplicitous, fastidious, fractious, glower, haughty, imperious and 22 more...
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touch
palp, tactile, brush, abut, bepaint, tinct, soupcon, graze, stroke, allude, nudge, epicritic and 67 more...
-
Touchy
Touch-sense metaphors, words and terms.
Includes general touch-oriented metaphors; words that seem like puns but reference the sense of touch, like: grasp (to grasp a concept), feeli...kinaesthesia, somatosensory, grasp, feelings, touchy, rubs, poke, kinesthetic, feels, hold, hands-on, moving and 14 more...
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Why We Curse: WTF?
This list collects the magnificent collection of vocabulary of the article "What the F***? Why We Curse," by Steven Pinker, in The New Republic (Oct. 2007). I think I'm more impressed with the coll...
curse, language, earthy, ancient, unthinkable, thinkable, emotional, rhyme, meter, alliteration, pleasure, metaphor and 196 more...
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GRE AWA
escalating, vehement, vehemence, hostility, paparazzi, regime, irrespective, scoop, exaggerated, overblown, unfetter, scrupulous and 272 more...
-
feeling words
twitterpated, loquacious, ambiguous, pensive, sluggish, anxious, adventurous, curious, abandoned, absent-minded, abrasive, abused and 653 more...
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ash
ash
abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abide, abject, abjure and 4874 more...
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words I don't like very much
many frequently used by moms; words that sound dirtier than they are
crisp, grunge, cuddle, puke, smear, voucher, manipulate, fodder, coddle, fecund, chunk, hunk and 71 more...
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Sensible
bliss, tear, ennui, reiki, prana, water, after taste, animal magnetism, earworm, amuse-bouche, emotionality, stupefied and 15 more...
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T
words starting with letter t
tonsure, topography, torpor, torrent, torrid, tortuous, totter, touchstone, touchy, tout, tract, tractable and 78 more...
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