Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- adj. Peevish; testy: "As a critic gets older, he or she usually grows more tetchy and limited in responses” ( James Wolcott).
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- adj. Easily annoyed or irritated; peevish, testy or irascible
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- adj. See techy.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adj. easily irritated or annoyed
Etymologies
Examples
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The narrative now is that he is getting "tetchy" about the stupid questions the media keep asking.
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I just have to hope that this kind of tetchy judicial questioning is the way they push the lawyers to make their best case.
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I guess "tetchy" came in when they completely revised it.
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MPA member Jenny Jones accused Mr Yates of being "tetchy" with the MPA when the issue was last discussed.
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
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He sits up in Connecticut, splendidly isolated, working day and night, a lonely and rather tetchy old man.
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It's down to midback again, and I'm very tetchy about it; at this length it's so heavy that it pulls most of the curl out of itself.
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I get tetchy, wanting to go out and get things done.
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Such things make the Davidites curse, along with his occasionally tetchy manner on television or a tendency to talk at, rather than to, some of his parliamentary colleagues.
David Miliband has left frontline politics – but for how long?
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The intention was to station one in each of his three main homes, he explained in that permanently tetchy rasp, but he loves them too much to leave them alone.
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And on this showing, the auspices are good, by and large making those dissenting voices seem querulous and tetchy.
hekate101 commented on the word tetchy
From the verb 'tetch', a variant of the Yiddish 'kvetch'.
December 16, 2008
siddharthsoni commented on the word tetchy
Wonder about the origin... Something similar to itchy, I presume.
December 16, 2008