Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A peevish, irascible person; a grouch.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An ill-natured person.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun colloq. An ill-natured person.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun US A
grumpy ,bad-tempered orirascible person.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a bad-tempered person
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[cross + patch, jester.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
cross (“grumpy”) + patch (“fool”).
Examples
Sorry, no example sentences found.
qms commented on the word crosspatch
See comments at pilulous.
February 12, 2016
MaryW commented on the word crosspatch
Kate Atkinson, Case Histories (New York: Little Brown & Co., 2004), p. 160.May 30, 2016
Gammerstang commented on the word crosspatch
(noun) - Patch was at one time a term of contempt. It did not . . . necessarily mean a fool, but signified what we now mean by a contemptible fellow. Shakespeare has A Midsummer Night's Dream: "A crew of patches, base mechanicals." Crosspatch is the only remnant of the word. It is very expressive of a cross, ill-tempered, disagreeable person.
--Eliezer Edwards' Dictionary of Words, Facts, and Phrases, 1882
January 17, 2018