What's the difference between peevish and tetchy?

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.

Tetchy


Definition:

  • (a.) See Techy.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) After a marathon of tetchy bilateral talks and barbed plenary speeches, the Chinese premier – who refused to enter the negotiations directly – flew back to Beijing without any public comment.
  • (2) It didn't look as if that was quite how he remembered it, but May pressed on, becoming ever more tetchy.
  • (3) Simon Walters, the political editor of the Mail on Sunday and co-author of the 17 June story, will appear before Leveson on Monday afternoon, raising the prospect of tetchy exchanges with the judge.
  • (4) And yet Dame Eileen's tetchy objection that casting middle-aged men as girls is not authentic kept coming to me as I braved the heat and seats at the Wanamaker.
  • (5) They are better than that team out there today, that’s the problem.” But a tetchy Van Gaal was in no mood to tolerate the opinions of a successful former generation.
  • (6) In a tetchy BBC Question Time encounter with Ukip’s Nigel Farage , it was Brand who produced the zinger, with the jibe that his opponent was “a pound-shop Enoch Powell ”.
  • (7) Hunt was emollient and calm, becoming tetchy only when challenged over the issue of GP contracts.
  • (8) The architect Zaha Hadid cut short a tetchy BBC radio interview to mark her being awarded the 2016 Riba Royal Gold Medal after mounting an angry defence of her Qatar World Cup stadium and Tokyo Olympic stadium projects.
  • (9) As the world's second- and third-biggest oil consumers, they are also rivals for energy, which has led to tetchy rows over a Siberian oil pipeline and gas fields in the South China Sea.
  • (10) But it became a rambling, often tetchy performance from Putin, repeatedly scolding journalists for failing to understand him, or for leaving their mobile phones on.
  • (11) Abbott is already trying to calm his friends on the right, tetchy at Turnbull’s profile and Abbott’s continuing low poll ratings.
  • (12) It's a fair enough decision I guess, but this hasn't been a tetchy game, I wonder whether there was a need to get the cards out there.
  • (13) But in one of a number of tetchy exchanges between the pair, Hodge declared herself “very sceptical about that”.
  • (14) In increasingly tetchy exchange, Myners says that the Co-op was paying a dividend worth £1bn in today's money.
  • (15) The media got into crisis mode, naturally, but we were never really tetchy: there was no hunt for Those Responsible, as one suspects there will be if things get really dry this time around.
  • (16) There was the truculent Ray Donovan, featuring Jon Voight; the truculent Luck, starring Dustin Hoffman as an absurdly tetchy racetrack gambler and gangster, involving much mumbling in half-lit rooms; and there was the truculent Boss, starring Kelsey Grammer as a corrupt Chicago mayor, which never quite escaped the stigma of expecting Niles Crane to burst into the room in a flap about missing his appointment to visit the newly opened downtown doll museum.
  • (17) New York Republican Lee Zeldin said: “There is another alternative other than war; it’s a better deal ... America got played like a five string quartet.” Like a Senate version last week , the lengthy hearing got increasingly tetchy, with both sides frequently interrupting each other, and Kerry – who entered on crutches after breaking his leg cycling – was forced to stand and stretch at times.
  • (18) Mantel added: “As for ex-politicians who have weighed in: the same tetchy commentators who made fools of themselves when my stories were first published have been persuaded to do it again.
  • (19) They - and Labour - should also worry about a feeling that can be picked up all over this constituency: that the tetchy disconnection from politics that went nuclear with the expenses crisis, was probably perpetuated by the very public fall of Chris Huhne, and shows no signs of going away, least of all round here.
  • (20) The chief executive, who has faced a campaign from some newspapers to step down following the publication of the report into serious failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS foundation trust , endured a long, tetchy grilling two weeks ago from the Commons health committee.