Synonyms for feisty
- bubbly
- courageous
- excitable
- fiery
- gritty
- gutsy
- high-strung
- lively
- scrappy
- spunky
- active
- alive
- difficult
- enthusiastic
- frisky
- full of pep
- game
- gutty
- hot-blooded
- mettlesome
- ornery
- peppy
- quarrelsome
- sensitive
- thin-skinned
- tough
- truculent
- zestful
Antonyms for feisty
EXAMPLES FROM THE WEB FOR FEISTY
I get sort of feisty and want to dav-il her by makin' you look pretty.
On an impulse he stepped up to the small man who began a grin of recognition, a grin that transformed his feisty face.
WORD ORIGIN
1896, "aggressive, exuberant, touchy," American English, with -y (2) + feist "small dog," earlier fice, fist (American English, 1805); short for fysting curre "stinking cur," attested from 1520s, from Middle English fysten, fisten "break wind" (mid-15c.); related to Old English fisting "stink," from Proto-Germanic *fistiz- "a fart," said to be from PIE *pezd- (see fart), but there are difficulties.
The 1811 slang dictionary defines fice as "a small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged on their lap-dogs." Cf. also Danish fise "to blow, to fart," and obsolete English aske-fise, "fire-tender," literally "ash-blower" (early 15c.), from an unrecorded Norse source, used in Middle English for a kind of bellows, but originally "a term of reproach among northern nations for an unwarlike fellow who stayed at home in the chimney corner" [OED].