ornery
Adjective Satellite
- having a difficult and contrary disposition; - Dorothy Sayers
Adj
- 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.
Adjective
- Stubborn, disagreeable, and ill-tempered.
Examples
- The ORNERY Q on his rack stubbornly refused to combine with any vowels.
Origin / Etymology
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”).
Synonyms
cantankerous, crotchety, contrary, crabby, cross-grained, full of the devil, honery, ill-tempered, intractable, obnoxious, obstreperous, peevish, stroppy, unsociable
Scrabble Score: 9
ornery: valid Scrabble (US) TWL Wordornery: valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
ornery: valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary