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flustered

adjectiveB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,281 of 15,258leans spoken

Flustered means hot, confused and rattled under sudden pressure. Get flustered, she looked flustered, don't fluster me.

It describes a temporary state caused by too much happening at once — being late, being watched, being asked three things together — and it is milder and more sympathetic than panicked. The visible signs are in the word: flustered people go red and lose their thread. The verb is fluster, usually transitive: it flustered her. Note unflustered, which is a real compliment, and unflappable, which is the stronger version of the same praise.

Definitions of flustered

  1. 1adjectiveflusteredConfused and agitated by sudden pressure.B2+

    “She got flustered and read the wrong page.”

    synonyms: agitated, rattled, flurried

flustered is a state of agitation.

Also accepted in games: agitated

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    *flostren

  2. English

    fluster

  3. English, today

    flustered

Built from

  • flostrynge · Middle English — agitation; blustering

fluster The verb is probably from Middle English flostren (implied in flostring, flostrynge (“agitation; blustering”)) from a Scandinavian (gmq -) language; compare Icelandic flaustra (“to bustle”), flaustr (“a bustle; a hurry”). Compare Old English flustrian (“to weave, plait, braid”). The noun is derived from the verb.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Feelings & Character, Moods & Relationships

Practise this word

flustered in the wild

  • Controversy arose when the lyrics of the song "Sisters of Mercy", which refers to nuns as "daughters of Hell" and "masters of pain", flustered religious groups.

    Not Commercial

  • Ada shares a home with her sharp-tongued daughter Ruth Pollitt (Barbara Mitchell) and her well-meaning but often flustered son-in-law Leslie (Jack Smethurst).

    For the Love of Ada

  • The film follows a man who is attached to his daughter but becomes flustered when he and his family prepare for her marriage.

    Abhiyum Naanum (film)

  • At any rate, he did not seem too flustered by the slip-up; it was, after all, the first show of his first solo tour since 1985.

    Days of Light (song)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the flostrynge family

flustered

flustered — used about once every 4,394 pages · #9,281 · point at the bar for the others