(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.
Petulant
Definition:
(a.) Forward; pert; insolent; wanton.
(a.) Capriciously fretful; characterized by ill-natured freakishness; irritable.
Example Sentences:
(1) "This speaks volumes of Hamilton and his petulant behaviour.
(2) One of the stories that took hold about the Klebolds after the shooting was that they were rich, and that Dylan’s violent behaviour was an extreme version of a spoilt child’s petulance.
(3) If we’re going to do this groupthink [a blanket ban] I think it would smack of petulance.” Jones added: “I stand by what Tony Abbott said: it [Q&A] is a lefty lynch mob.
(4) For a man who can clearly dance, he tends to deliver with a petulant shrug rather than an enthusiastic bang.
(5) One expects tension between a government and charities that tell inconvenient truths, but this has become a notoriously fearful, petulant, and intolerant administration.
(6) Toby Young called her a "petulant prima donna" in the Telegraph, while Observer critic Robert McCrum wrote that, as "an ebullient and pioneering feminist publisher from the 1970s [it's] hardly a surprise that she should find herself unresponsive to Roth's lifelong subject: the adventures of the ordinary sexual [American] man".
(7) His latest show of petulance drew boos from a crowd largely sympathetic to his antics up to that point.
(8) Stuart Lancaster and his coaching team sat looking down at the floor when Owen Farrell received a yellow card 10 minutes from the end for an act of petulance that in part explained why England have failed to live up to the high standard set in the pool of death, perhaps in the hope of a sink hole opening up and taking them away.
(9) Croatia have won 4-0 due in no small part to the idiocy of Alexandre Song, who was sent off in the first off for a preposterous show of petulance.
(10) Goaded, taunted and tormented by the prosecution, Pistorius was perhaps his own worst enemy during cross-examination, suffering surprising memory lapses and appearing evasive, agitated, petulant and self-contradictory.
(11) With great power comes great responsibility, so Facebook , and other large technology companies like Google, Amazon and Netflix need to be watched, critiqued and regulated if necessary, just like any other corporation or petulant adolescent.
(12) A petulant Henry cursed wretched foreigners and launched his own Brexit by leaving the church of Rome.
(13) But that is not possible for as long as Assad remains in power without any timetable for his departure, and for as long as his security forces murder, torture, gas and bomb his own people.” Nigel Dodds, the deputy DUP leader, indicated he was likely to back airstrikes and issued a vicious assault on the Labour leadership, saying: “It’s the petulant, putrid response of the irresponsible revolutionary bedsit they barely seem to have clambered out of.
(14) Chris Bryant, the former minister for Europe and chairman of the parliamentary all-party Russia group, said in a statement: "Having visited the trial and seen for myself the farcical way in which it was being conducted, with ludicrous trumped up charges and a petulant martinet of a prosecutor, it is entirely predictable that [Khodorkovsky] has been found guilty."
(15) Pakistan authorities counter claim that, emboldened by countrywide instability and foreign support, Baloch feudal leaders have petulantly demanded ever more royalties.
(16) They see the protesters as petulant malcontents and repeat Trump’s accusation that some of them are surely getting paid to demonstrate.
(17) I give all my customers five stars except Nicholas, whom I give one star out of petulance at his laziness.
(18) She was vulnerable, touching, kindly, loving, wholly lacking in malice, occasionally petulant in a good cause, and demonstrated her lack of talent for guile whenever she entered upon some well-intentioned intrigue.
(19) Obama has responded with emotions rarely seen during his stoical administration: anger at “hysterical” politicians back home, sorrow at the thought of sending US troops into another Middle East war he fears would be unwinnable, and petulance in the face of those who question his resolve.
(20) He not only represents everything a DJ shouldn't be – obnoxious, petulant, unfunny, and so over-fond of his own horrible, squeaky voice that entire half-hours can pass without any music being played – he represents everything that's wrong with this country.