Contempt is deciding that someone is beneath you, and letting it show. The small laugh at a person's accent, the eye-roll while they are still speaking, the way their name gets said.
It takes FOR: contempt for the rules, contempt for anyone who asks for help. Two adjectives come from it and they are not interchangeable — contemptuous is what the sneering person is, contemptible is what the sneered-at thing is, so you get a contemptuous glance and a contemptible excuse. In court it names a specific offence: contempt of court is disobeying a judge, and it can put you in a cell. 'Beneath contempt' is the strongest version, meaning not even worth despising. It is colder than anger, too: anger says you matter and you have wronged me, contempt says you do not matter at all.
1nouncontemptThe feeling that someone or something is worthless and beneath you.
“There was contempt in the way he folded the letter away.”
2noundisobedienceDisobedience to a court of law.
“The journalist was held in contempt for refusing to name a source.”
contempt is a feeling.
Also accepted in games: scorn, disdain
Contempt comes from Latin contemptus, 'scorn', from contemnō, 'to scorn, despise' — com- attached to temnō, which already meant to look down on something. The Latin word walked into English and pushed out the Old English name for the same feeling, forsewennes, which nobody has needed since.
Latin
contemptus — scorn
English, today
contempt
Built from
From Latin contemptus (“scorn”), from contemnō (“to scorn, despise”), from com- + temnō (“to despise”). Displaced native Old English forsewennes.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA