Word of the Day:
ornery
What It Means
Disagreeable, stubborn, and troublesome to deal with; cantankerous.
Troublesome to deal with in a good way; mischievous, prankish, teasing.
Ordinary, commonplace; hence, inferior, plain-looking, unpleasant.
Ornery in Context
“Through Michael sped the thought: 'Could I make her jealous?' And he was shocked at it. A low-down thought—mean and ornery!”
Did You Know?
A contracted or dialectal pronunciation of ordinary. Sense 3 (“ordinary, commonplace”) was the earliest sense; the meaning of the word then shifted to “inferior, plain-looking, unpleasant”—presumably due to ordinariness—and finally to sense 1 (“disagreeable, stubborn, and troublesome to deal with”).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: ornery (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “ornery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ornery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.