Peevish, crabby, irritable, ornery and bad-tempered

Question

What's the difference between them?As far as I personally get them + I've consulted the major dictionaries.Peevish - Easily annoyed by unimportant thingsCrabby - Easily annoyed by unimportant thingsIrritable - easily annoyed by possibly unimportant things or/ possibly cos you're tired, upset or in a similar bad situation. Essentially the same as Peevish and CrabbyBad tempered - Generally easily annoyed and talks in an angry way backOrnery - easily annoyed and difficultIs there something I'm missing or don't perceive in the difference?

BarbaraPA · Accepted Answer

Do you understand the difference between the weather at the moment and the overall climate?

Usually it's warm in the spring, but yesterday it was quite hot.
Usually, she's quite sweet-tempered, but today she was downright crabby.

I don't use "peevish" myself. "Crabby" and "irritable" are about the same, but "crabby" is far more informal (for me).

Bad tempered is someone's overall nature or personality. It's the climate, not the weather.

Ornery suggests that the person will be difficult, will enjoy arguing, may even disagree for the sake of disagreeing. It's not used often, in my experience,

AlpheccaStars · Answer

Peevish is a five-dollar word. ( fraze.it finds about 99 examples. Shakespeare used it, but with a different meaning than modern usage.
http://fraze.it/n_search.jsp?q=peevish&l=0&t=0&ffo=true&findid=-1&ff= )
Crabby is a 10-cent (rather informal) word. (Being tired can make you crabby, and crabby people aren't too fun to hang around. )

Ornery is old-fashioned, used for animals (An ornery mule or camel) and the elderly (Grandpa became more ornery in his dotage), popular in US Western and sports contexts. Ornery can be a permanent condition. Ornery was coined in the late 1800s. (An' deah Lord, good Lord, it ain't like yo' mercy, it ain't like yo' pity, it ain't like yo' long-sufferin' lovin'-kindness for to take dis kind o' 'vantage o' sich little chil'en as dese is when dey's so many ornery grown folks chuck full o' cussedness..)

Irritable is far more common and general than all the other synonyms. Irritable is a temporary condition. It is used in medical contexts ( irritable bowel syndrome).

Check fraze.it for example usage, and you can see the typical contexts and frequency of usage.

Check ngrams, and you will find that "crabby" and "ornery" are more common in American English than in British English. You can also get older citations.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ornery%2Cirritable%2Ccrabby%2Cpeevish&year_start=1940&year_end=2008&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cornery%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cirritable%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ccrabby%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cpeevish%3B%2Cc0

Peevish, crabby, irritable, ornery and bad-tempered

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