cantankerous
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Playing a confounding, cantankerous old painter who hasn’t touched a canvas in at least 20 years, Mr. McKellen delivers yet another marvelous late-career highlight.
From The Wall Street Journal • Apr. 9, 2026
More character actor than leading man, he could be relied upon to inject a feisty, fiery machismo and a cantankerous contrariness into the most mainstream Hollywood offering.
From BBC • Feb. 16, 2026
The pair takes the cold case team starring in Jussi Adler-Olsen’s series of novels and transports them to Edinburgh, casting the cantankerous Carl as an English outsider among Scots.
From Salon • Jun. 28, 2025
With a gimlet eye and a surprisingly girlish laugh, Vera is cantankerous, impatient, intensely private, unapologetically disheveled and utterly glorious.
From Los Angeles Times • Jan. 9, 2025
That made me a bit cantankerous, because crazy as she was, I could see the sense in making a neat row of ground piled on each side to keep the moisture from running off.
From "Moon Over Manifest" by Clare Vanderpool
Vocabulary lists containing cantankerous
In the Mood? 100 Words to Describe Emotions
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Negative Words to Describe a Person
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Grade 10, List 5
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