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/kræbd/ Listen

adjective

Crabbed adj.

Characterized by or manifesting, sourness, peevishness, or moroseness; harsh; cross; cynical; applied to feelings, disposition, or manners. "Crabbed age and youth can not live together."

Characterized by harshness or roughness; unpleasant; applied to things; as, a crabbed taste.

Obscure; difficult; perplexing; trying; as, a crabbed author. "Crabbed eloquence." "How charming is divine philosophy! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose."

Cramped; irregular; as, crabbed handwriting.

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Etymology of 'Crabbed'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Crabbed" Quotes from Famous Books

... were three batches of from six to ten youngsters each during the course of the season. He also did a father's share of work with the children. I think he hated hatching them. He would settle upon the roof above the nest, and chirp in a crabbed, imposed-upon tone until his wife came out. As she flew briskly away, he would look disconsolately around at the bright busy world, ruffle his feathers, scold to himself, and then crawl dutifully in upon ...

— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp

... is plain and spare to the verge of a gaunt severity, and there is not one single picture-frame on the wide expanse of wall. On the table are a few books and some letters, with foreign postmarks, and addressed in the crabbed handwriting of Continental scholars. Over the table a brazen lamp hangs suspended by a slender chain. In a corner are some fragments of stone mouldings and wood carvings like the panel of an ancient pew. There are no shelves and no bookcase. Besides those on the ...

— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... there at any rate who do not agree with it. Long ago I wrote a protest in which I asked why Englishmen had forgotten the great state of Virginia, the first in foundation and long the first in leadership; and why a few crabbed Nonconformists should have the right to erase a record that begins with Raleigh and ends with Lee, and incidentally includes Washington. The great state of Virginia was the backbone of America until it was broken in the Civil War. From Virginia came the first great Presidents and most of the ...

— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... religion of the civilized world, hardly excites curiosity enough in them to take it up and read a single verse! I have often offered it to them to read, but they have refused to open the book. A great disadvantage is the crabbed, miserable language into which it is translated. After the bold, impudent, and sublime language of the Koran, they cannot relish the tame and stunted language of the Arabic New Testament. As for the simple and grand truths of the New Testament, these they ...

— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... peasant mowing the grass in front of the boy's distant parental home. A few days later I discovered the meaning of this series of pictures. Disagreeable family relations had made the boy nervous. It was the case of a strict and crabbed father who lived unhappily with his mother, and whose educational methods consisted in threats; of the separation of his father from his tender and delicate mother, and the remarrying of his father, who one day brought home a young woman as his new mamma. The illness of the fourteen-year-old ...

— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

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