Word.ws English Dictionary

Meldrewish

Meldrewish adjective: grumpy; prone to peevish exasperation.

Adjective

Meldrewish (comparative more Meldrewish, superlative most Meldrewish)

  1. grumpy; prone to peevish exasperation
    • If occasionally a poem luxuriates in its nostalgia without much point ('Without Potatoes' is a Meldrewish whinge about Spud-U-Likes), […]1998, Stephen Phillips, Galloway Kyle, Harold Monro, Poetry Review, page 89
    • Far from being a Meldrewish ogre, Wilson turns out to be one of the friendliest, most open-hearted and most modest […]2007, The Spectator, volume 303, page 55
    Synonyms:
    Meldrewesque

Synonyms of Meldrewish

Forms of Meldrewish

comparativemore Meldrewish
superlativemost Meldrewish

Origin of Meldrewish

From Meldrew + -ish, after Victor Meldrew, a grumpy old man who is the fictional protagonist of the 1990s sitcom One Foot in the Grave.

Questions about Meldrewish

What does Meldrewish mean?
Meldrewish means grumpy; prone to peevish exasperation.
What part of speech is Meldrewish?
Meldrewish is an adjective.

Words near Meldrewish in the dictionary

  1. Meldon
  2. meldonium
  3. Meldreth
  4. Meldrew
  5. Meldrewesque
  6. Meldrewish
  7. Meldrum
  8. Meldrums
  9. melds
  10. meldub
  11. mele

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Meldrewish (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: “Meldrewish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/meldrewish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.