What's the difference between irascible and peevish?

Irascible


Definition:

  • (a.) Prone to anger; easily provoked or inflamed to anger; choleric; irritable; as, an irascible man; an irascible temper or mood.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) I learned that the hard way: when I was younger, I played the part of the erratic, irascible drunk in order to have something to write about.
  • (2) All round Europe there have been political earthquakes in a volatile anti-politics age: the surprise is that Britain’s scratchy, irascible electorate hasn’t expressed its underlying anger that ordinary people paid the price for the bankers’ crash.
  • (3) Kaczyński is behaving like Józef Piłsudski, the brilliant but irascible prewar leader who brought Poland back to independence in 1918.
  • (4) The mother is irascible, the father aloof; on the other hand, the parental combination "mother and father affectionate" is more common.
  • (5) The ability to be a good listener, unflappable and patient enough to deal with irascible family members, mediating family spats and calming ruffled feathers also helps.
  • (6) But she's not bad as the partner of an Iraq-bound soldier in Timeless: perhaps a bit plummier than you might expect a squaddie's wife required to live with her irascible great-grandmother in a tiny house to be, but certainly nothing like the disaster the world has come to expect from supermodels demonstrating their polymath abilities.
  • (7) Nancy's novels and Jessica's memoirs offered a beguiling - and friends thought - inaccurate picture of the extraordinary life lived out chez Mitford under the irascible gaze of Lord Redesdale ("Uncle Matthew" in Love in a Cold Climate), celebrated for his dislike of foreigners and his daughters' friends, disparaged collectively as "sewers".
  • (8) In 1959, he starred in Carol Reed's Our Man In Havana, and a year later gave a brilliantly unpleasant Scottish impersonation of an irascible soldier in Tunes Of Glory.
  • (9) Known for his irascibility, the writer has in one sense softened in late middle age.
  • (10) Now the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, famous for giving ruthlessly short shrift to politicians, has confirmed that his irascible on-screen attitude towards Westminster is more than skin deep.
  • (11) But his less enthusiastic answer about Bannon comes amid reports of infighting in the Trump White House, all of which place the gruff, irascible Bannon at the center.
  • (12) The clinico-pathological characteristics of the case were as follows: Fibrillary gliosis of the midbrain and pontine reticular formation corresponded clinically to personality changes: The patient had formerly been irascible and became extremely mild-mannered.
  • (13) All good knockabout stuff and the makings of a legend - irascible, menacing, self-important, egoistical.
  • (14) His father was an irascible, blind barrister, the Mortimer of Mortimer on Wills, Probate and Divorce.
  • (15) Yet, if you speak to some at Shirebrook, she seems to portray an image that can be as irascible as charming.
  • (16) Though more conservative in his politics, McAvoy, with his irascible personality and his unfortunate attitude to authority, is thought to be based on the former MSNBC news host Keith Olbermann, who quit the network after a very public falling-out, going then to the upstart Current TV channel, which he left in March this year after another row with the management.
  • (17) Typical Munchausen behaviors such as irascibility, the desperate search for care, and pseudologia fantastica, may be understood as solutions to problems created by brain damage.
  • (18) Wrestling with an opponent who will not recognise the prejudice in a phrase like "hideous Jewish face" had finally pushed Rampton, who cultivates a manner of curmudgeonly irascibility, into a foul mood.
  • (19) What is quickly turning into a public relations nightmare for the irascible Rodman – whose fellow players looked like they would rather be anywhere but Pyongyang during his tetchy pre-game interview with CNN on Tuesday – can only have helped burnish Kim's reputation, at least at home.
  • (20) It was an unexpected flash of humanity from this irascible stickler for social propriety.

Peevish


Definition:

  • (a.) Habitually fretful; easily vexed or fretted; hard to please; apt to complain; querulous; petulant.
  • (a.) Expressing fretfulness and discontent, or unjustifiable dissatisfaction; as, a peevish answer.
  • (a.) Silly; childish; trifling.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) She says it began as a "defence mechanism" – "it gets you out of so many sticky situations" – but it has now become the means by which Delevingne communicates her sense of fun, in a world where most models seem to adopt a bored, peevish expression of someone queuing to return a faulty toaster in Argos.
  • (2) he says, but his laughter sounds more peevish than amused.
  • (3) By the end of the episode, a secret letter from Matthew granting his share of the estate to Mary – passing over George, his son – has turned up; Lord Grantham has bravely acceded to a partnership with his most peevish daughter; Lady Cora has found a new maid and Carson has come to terms with his past.
  • (4) One or two peevish voices thought Imlah too clever, too dustily "Oxonian", failing to see how mordantly modern many of the fables and instances in Birthmarks are, within their formal virtuosity and confidently literary bearing.
  • (5) When judges in New Jersey made it the fourteenth state (and third most populous, after California and New York) to join the club, the good people of cable news spent almost no time talking about the men and women getting married – and much more talking about Chris Christie, the peevish governor who dropped his appeal .
  • (6) That’s the peevish cry of our toddler culture | Marina Hyde Read more It was a privileged, cushioned move, smoothed by the presence of my mother, who waited a few months for me to settle down.
  • (7) From his tobacco-fugged study in Croisset, the Normandy hamlet where he lived with his mother and niece, Flaubert created an autonomous parallel universe: fiction as refuge from an outside world full of pain, peevishness and bourgeois vulgarity.
  • (8) Then he reversed the usual procedure and moved us greatly in the early scenes, where Lear so often only shows for a peevish tyrant.
  • (9) That’s the peevish cry of our toddler culture | Marina Hyde Read more The former Everton, Spurs and Barcelona striker has continued to speak his mind on Twitter despite the polarised reaction.
  • (10) This peevish remark, however, came from an unusual source.
  • (11) One is tempted to focus on her peculiarly peevish demeanor, a Grinchy soft-talking that sounds, even at the start of speeches, like she’s already had.
  • (12) When he's not pebbledashing the screen with peevish vowels the duke – AKA John Spencer-Churchill, AKA, bewilderingly, "Sunny" – spends his time power-walking along staggeringly ornate corridors, a maddeningly elusive blur of industry and corduroy.
  • (13) As he remarks peevishly to his wife when she shakes him out of yet another reverie: "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?"
  • (14) I smell with my little nose peevish self-doubting straights: were same-sex couples considered fine until they started getting good and winning trophies?
  • (15) But I am tired beyond belief of the peevish and western-centric commonplace that Ai is, somehow, both a heroic activist and a mediocre artist.
  • (16) It seems there is no one in Number 10 willing or able to tell her that she often comes across as arrogant and complacent, another difference from Corbyn, whose advisers have successfully convinced him to hide his peevish irritation with impudent journalists.
  • (17) Hubristic, peevish, and not a little paranoid, only he has the power to reverse this.
  • (18) Amarkhil himself was allegedly captured in some of the conversations played to journalists, asking a contact to "bring the sheep, stuffed properly", but also complaining peevishly about how little attention Ghani was giving him.
  • (19) We’ve got some good friends who are gay and they should have the right to be married.” A lone protester is sitting outside with police, peevish and aggrieved: “They grabbed me and pushed me out.