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peevish

UK/ˈpiːvɪʃ/US/ˈpivɪʃ/
adjectiveC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,311 of 15,258leans spoken

Peevish means irritable over small things. A peevish tone, peevish complaints, sound peevish.

It is a mild and slightly belittling word, since calling somebody peevish says the annoyance was out of proportion. It is used of tired children and of adults behaving like them.

Definitions of peevish

  1. 1adjectivepeevishIrritable over small things.C1

    “The baby grew peevish and cried because she had missed her nap.”

peevish is a quality.

Where it comes from

Middle English pevish first meant capricious or perverse, of uncertain origin.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *per-

  2. Middle English

    pievish

  3. English, today

    peevish

Built from

  • pevysh · Middle English — capricious, wilful; perverse, wayward

The adjective is derived from Late Middle English pievish, peuysche, pevish, pevysh (“capricious, wilful; perverse, wayward”); further etymology, possibly from one of the following:

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

peevish in the wild

  • Tolkien had Bilbo use attercop to insult attacking spiders, the insult possibly deriving from its meaning in Northern England dialect of "peevish, ill-natured person".

    Attercopus

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.