Word.ws English Dictionary

crankiest

crankiest is the superlative form of cranky.

Meaning of cranky

Adjective

cranky (comparative crankier, superlative crankiest)

  1. (usually) Not in good working condition; defective, faulty.
    • We had seven canoes, all of them dugouts. One was small, one was cranky, and two were old, waterlogged, and leaky. The other three were good.1914, Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness: The River of Doubt
    Synonyms:
    shaky
  2. Grouchy, grumpy, irritable; easily upset.
    • He got home from a long day at work tired and cranky.
  3. Not in perfect mental working order; eccentric, peculiar.
    • Uncle Esau is as cranky as hell, and a peculiar old duck, but I think he'll like a fine upstanding young man as big as you be.1934 December, Robert E. Howard, “The Road to Bear Creek”, in Action Stories
  4. Synonym of crank (“of a ship: liable to capsize because of poorly stowed cargo or insufficient ballast”).
    • a cranky vessel
    Synonyms:
    crank
  5. (archaic) Full of spirit; spirited.
  6. (obsolete) Weak, unwell.

Questions about crankiest

What is crankiest the superlative form of?
Crankiest is the superlative form of cranky.

Words near crankiest in the dictionary

  1. crankery
  2. crankest
  3. crankhandle
  4. crankhandles
  5. crankier
  6. crankiest
  7. crankily
  8. crankiness
  9. crankinesses
  10. cranking
  11. cranking it

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: crankiest (page history and authors); cranky (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “crankiest.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/crankiest. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.