Word.ws English Dictionary

nervier

nervier is the comparative form of nervy.

Meaning of nervy

Adjective

nervy (comparative nervier, superlative nerviest)

  1. (US) Having nerve; bold; brazen.
    • It takes a nervy man to promulgate such stuff, and Ted Nelson has made a career out of being nervy.1988 April, David Gans, “Ted Nelson And The Ultimate Information Machine”, in MicroTimes, page 55
  2. (UK) Feeling nervous, anxious or agitated.
    • Blackpool continue to thrive on the adrenalin rush of the end-of-season shoot-out and are heading for a second Wembley date in two years after negotiating a nervy path past Birmingham.2012 May 9, John Percy, “Birmingham City 2 Blackpool 2 (2-3 on agg): match report”, in The Telegraph
  3. (archaic) Strong; sinewy.
    • And, for those simple times, his garments were / A chieftain-king's: beneath his breast, half bare, / Was hung a silver bugle, and between / His nervy knees there lay a boar-spear keen […]1818, John Keats, “Book I”, in Endymion: A Poetic Romance, London: […] T[homas] Miller, […] for Taylor and Hessey, […], →OCLC, page 1
  4. Jittery; having unwanted signal characteristics.

Questions about nervier

What is nervier the comparative form of?
Nervier is the comparative form of nervy.

Words near nervier in the dictionary

  1. nervewracking
  2. nervewracks
  3. nervi intermedii
  4. Nervian
  5. nervicited
  6. nervier
  7. nerviest
  8. Nervii
  9. nervily
  10. nervimotility
  11. nervimotion

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nervier (page history and authors); nervy (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: “nervier.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nervier. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.