prickly
prickly adjective: covered with sharp points.
Adjective
prickly (comparative pricklier, superlative prickliest)
- Covered with sharp points.
- The prickly pear is a cactus; you have to peel it before eating it to remove the spines and the tough skin.
- Easily irritated; thorny.
- He has a prickly personality. He doesn't get along with people because he is easily set off.
- Difficult; complicated; hairy or thorny.
- It was a prickly situation.
- People who are prickly can’t be hurt any more. They’ve had it. So we just have to be prickly to make sure nobody’s going to come in and grab us.2021 March 27, Simon Hattenstone, quoting Charlotte Rampling, “Charlotte Rampling: ‘I am prickly. People who are prickly can’t be hurt any more’”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
Adverb
prickly (comparative more prickly, superlative most prickly)
- In a prickly manner.
- Striding across stage in his bright white jacket, his voice soaring and cracking – like Charlie Parker’s – he was nervous but prickly eloquent, caustic yet encouraging.2016 March 3, David Thomson, The Guardian
Noun
prickly (plural pricklies)
- Something that gives a pricking sensation; a sharp object.
- Below, way out on the flat, Blue had seen a light green that could be graze but up here was nothing 'cept all kinds of prickly bushes, and too many of them. Ground-spreading pricklies that reached out to jump at a horse's belly […]2002, William A. Luckey, Long Ride to Nowhere, page 75
- Dad, I need to ride on your shoulders because the pricklies hurt my feet.2016, Richard J. Sklba, Joseph Juknialis, Easter Fire: Fire Starters for the Easter Weekday Homily, page 113
- A person who favours formal, structured, organized settings.
- Planned variation was based on systematically applying different educational approaches developed by academic experts, each of whom was to become a "sponsor" of a single type of program – from highly structured classroom models, sometimes called "pricklies," to open classrooms and more exploratory...1976 February 15, Pamela Moore, “Follow Through—Biggest Social Science Study Ever …”, in Daniel S[heldon] Greenberg, editor, Science & Government Report: The Independent Bulletin of Science Policy...
- Alan Watts says that these two types may be named the "prickly" people and the "gooey" people. The pricklies, he says, the Marthas, are tough-minded, rigorous, and precise and like to stress differences and divisions between things. The gooeys, the Marys, are tender-minded romanticists who love...1979, Robert C. Wright, “Reminiscing and Romancing in Mid-America: Rumes, Romances, Stories, and Poems”, in Frederick Manfred, Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, G[arrison] K[ent] Hall & Co., →ISBN...
- Antonyms:
- gooey
prickly meaning in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam
prickly in Hindi
- covered with sharp points
- कटीला kaṭīlā
prickly in Tamil
- கூரியமுள்ள, கூரியுள்ள, கடினமான, எளிதில் எரிச்சலடையக்கூடிய
prickly in Telugu
- ప్రిక్లీ
prickly in Malayalam
- കണ്ടകീതമായ, മുള്ളുമുള്ളായ, പരുപരുത്ത, മുള്ളുനിറഞ്ഞ
More languagesFewer languages
- prickly in Kannada
- ಮುಳ್ಳಿರುವ, ಮುಳ್ಳಿನಿಂದ ಕೂಡಿದ, ಮೈಮುಳ್ಳಾಗುವ, ಜುಮ್ಮೆನ್ನುವ
Examples of prickly in a sentence
- The prickly pear cactus is an introduced species in Australia.
- A red-tailed hawk swooped down into a stand of prickly pears in a “wasty” moonscape.
- When the prickly pear stickers pierced their paws they howled with pain, but they kept running.
Synonyms of prickly
Antonyms
Forms of prickly
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | pricklier |
| superlative | prickliest |
| Adverb | |
| comparative | more prickly |
| superlative | most prickly |
| Noun | |
| plural | pricklies |
Origin of prickly
From prickle + -y.
Words formed from prickly
- nonprickly
- prickliness
- prickly ash
- prickly chaff flower
- prickly comfrey
- prickly glasswort
- prickly hakea
- prickly heat
- prickly heath
- prickly hornwort
- prickly lettuce
- prickly nightshade
- prickly oak
- prickly pear
- prickly pear cactus
- prickly pine
- prickly poison
- prickly poppy
- prickly saltwort
- prickly sculpin
- prickly-seeded spinach
- prickly shark
- prickly shield fern
- prickly tang
- prickly thrift
- unprickly
- western prickly juniper
- cold prickly
Phrases with prickly
Questions about prickly
- What does prickly mean?
- Prickly means covered with sharp points.
- What is prickly in Hindi?
- Prickly in Hindi is कटीला (kaṭīlā). See Prickly meaning in Hindi.
- What part of speech is prickly?
- Prickly can be an adjective, an adverb or a noun.
Words near prickly in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: prickly (page history and authors); prickly (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); prickly (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); prickly (Malayalam Wiktionary) (page history and authors); prickly (Kannada Wiktionary) (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Back ache-prickly.wav.
Cite this entry: “prickly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/prickly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.