Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Sourness or acidness of taste, character, or tone.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Sourness, with roughness or astringency of taste.
  • noun Poignancy or severity.
  • noun Harshness or severity, as of temper or expression.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Sourness of taste, with bitterness and astringency, like that of unripe fruit.
  • noun Harshness, bitterness, or severity.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Sourness of taste, with bitterness and astringency, like that of unripe fruit.
  • noun Harshness, bitterness, or severity; as, acerbity of temper, of language, of pain

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a rough and bitter manner
  • noun a sharp bitterness
  • noun a sharp sour taste

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French acerbité, from Latin acerbitās ("acerbity; harshness"), from acerbus ("bitter"). See acerb.

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Examples

  • In the other countries of Europe, racial and religious acerbity is intensified by economic and political agitation.

    The Social Disability of the Jew 1969

  • In the other countries of Europe, racial and religious acerbity is intensified by economic and political agitation.

    The Social Disability of the Jew 1908

  • In the other countries of Europe, racial and religious acerbity is intensified by economic and political agitation.

    The Social Disability of the Jew 1908

  • Bonaparte a kind of acerbity and bitter irony, of which he long endeavoured to discover the cause.

    Complete Project Gutenberg Collection of Memoirs of Napoleon Various

  • He perceived in Bonaparte a kind of acerbity and bitter irony, of which he long endeavoured to discover the cause.

    The Memoirs of Napoleon Bourrienne, Louis Antoine Fauvelet de 1836

  • The only modern pictures that accomplish a higher end than that of pleasing the eye -- the only ones that really take hold of my mind, and with a kind of acerbity, like unripe fruit -- are the works of Hunt, and one or two other painters of the

    Passages from the English Notebooks, Complete Nathaniel Hawthorne 1834

  • The only modern pictures that accomplish a higher end than that of pleasing the eye -- the only ones that really take hold of my mind, and with a kind of acerbity, like unripe fruit -- are the works of Hunt, and one or two other painters of the

    Passages from the English Notebooks, Volume 2. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1834

  • Bonaparte a kind of acerbity and bitter irony, of which he long endeavoured to discover the cause.

    Memoirs of Napoleon — Complete Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne 1801

  • Bonaparte a kind of acerbity and bitter irony, of which he long endeavoured to discover the cause.

    Memoirs of Napoleon — Volume 01 Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne 1801

  • 'acerbity' meant that 'you ate nothing but vegetable food,' and so on all down the list.

    Rilla of Ingleside Lucy Maud 1921

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