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spiteful

UK/ˈspaɪtfʊl/US/ˈspaɪtfʊl/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,370 of 15,258neutral

Spiteful means doing small cruel things just to hurt somebody. A spiteful remark, purely spiteful, spiteful behaviour.

The smallness and the pointlessness are both part of it: spite gains the person nothing, which is what makes it worse than self-interest. It describes acts and remarks rather than large cruelties. Note spite, the noun; in spite of, which uses the word in a quite different and now purely grammatical way; and cut off your nose to spite your face.

Definitions of spiteful

  1. 1adjectivespitefulDoing small cruel things just to hurt somebody.C1

    “She deleted his photos from their shared album just to be spiteful.”

    synonyms: malicious, vindictive

spiteful is a quality of petty cruelty.

Also accepted in games: malicious

Where it comes from

Spite plus -ful. Spite is a shortening of despite, from Latin despicere, to look down on. Despise and despite come from the same looking down.

  1. Middle English

    spytefulle

  2. English, today

    spiteful

From Middle English spytefulle. by surface analysis, en + spite + ful.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Feelings & Character

Practise this word

spiteful in the wild

  • In modern French, Portuguese (megera), Modern Greek, Italian (megera), Polish (megiera), Russian, Ukrainian, Czech (megera) and Swedish, this name denotes a jealous or spiteful woman.

    Megaera

  • Hadfield uses deliberately spiteful acts to illustrate the difference between disposition and sentiment.

    Spite (sentiment)

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.