as in irritable
having or showing a habitually bad temper
an ill-natured and unpleasant old horse that sometimes bites
Synonyms & Similar Words
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Antonyms & Near Antonyms
Example Sentences
Recent Examples of Synonyms for ill-natured
Adjective
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Strong winds also may have North Texans feeling more irritable, which scientists blame on there being too many positive ions in the air.—
Brayden Garcia,
Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
20 Mar. 2025 -
Signs of overextension burnout include feeling emotionally drained, becoming irritable and struggling to focus—all of which can affect both your work and personal life.—
Mark Travers,
Forbes,
27 Feb. 2025
Adjective
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Harry Belafonte was angry at Martin Luther King’s funeral.—
Made by History,
Time,
4 Apr. 2025
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Related article People are angry at Gen Z taking photos of airport trays.—
Maureen O'Hare,
CNN Money,
4 Apr. 2025
Adjective
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The United States’s three most powerful European allies disagree with its plan for ending the brutal, destructive stalemate in Ukraine, with Germany the most disagreeable.—
Dominic Green,
Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government,
21 Feb. 2025
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Sometimes that means confronting disagreeable people.—
David Plazas,
The Tennessean,
24 Apr. 2024
Adjective
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In his new biography of Barnes, Blake Gopnik foregrounds this democratic ethos, focusing specifically on the philanthropist’s contributions to building racial equality—despite Barnes’s notoriously cantankerous personality and his tendency toward invective and slur.—
Kelly Presutti,
ARTnews.com,
12 Mar. 2025
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Hackman's criminal mastermind was wily, vain, cantankerous, and a bit too sure of himself.—
David Morgan,
CBS News,
27 Feb. 2025
Adjective
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That pleasurable little paradox can be traced as far back as the 1952 classic melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful, or as recently as 2022's bilious Babylon.—
Tom Gliatto,
People.com,
26 Mar. 2025
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In the Nineties, the report became a staple in the bilious feedstock of right-wing militias, part of a slurry of propaganda that turned legitimate grievances into the conviction that FEMA agents in unmarked black helicopters were soon to enact a new world order.—
Dan Piepenbring,
Harper's Magazine,
19 Feb. 2025
Adjective
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And while there is enough splenetic wit and manic detail to generate obsessive fandom (entire sections of Web sites are dedicated to deciphering just what Kenny is mumbling), subjects like alien abduction, genetic engineering, and Kathie Lee are hardly original targets for satire.—
Chris Norris,
SPIN,
13 Aug. 2022
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Meanwhile, the commentator and controversialist Piers Morgan, an obsessively close observer and relentless critic of Meghan, inevitably waded in with his usual splenetic views.—
Sarah Lyall,
New York Times,
17 Sep. 2022
Adjective
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The protagonist is an ornery, unemployed academic (Lee Sung-jae) who becomes fixated on a barking dog in his apartment complex, and goes to extreme lengths to silence it.—
Alison Willmore,
Vulture,
7 Mar. 2025
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The offensive line, in Monken’s estimation, is the most talented and possibly most ornery unit he’s had at West Point, all the way down to wrestling each other to settle arguments about who’s tougher.—
Brian Hamilton,
The Athletic,
21 Nov. 2024
Adjective
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Alice in Wonderland is the exception with a $1 billion global take, made with the acid stylings of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp when the latter was hot as hell in a pre-streaming 2010.—
Anthony D'Alessandro,
Deadline,
31 Mar. 2025
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The company is a leading supplier of liquid and dry, acid and bicarbonate concentrates for dialysis patients in the United States.—
Quartz Intelligence Newsroom,
Quartz,
20 Mar. 2025
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Cite this Entry
“Ill-natured.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/ill-natured. Accessed 13 Apr. 2025.
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