querulous
/ˈkwɛrʊləs
/ /ˈkwɛrjʊləs /adjective
Complaining in a rather petulant or whining manner: she became querulous and demanding...
- He is thereby reduced to the status of a child, though a spoiled child with the physical capabilities of a man: petulant, demanding, querulous, self-centered, and violent if he doesn't get his own way.
- Must poetry always be difficult to understand, asks another querulous voice; the poet's response, to the effect that poetry is a sort of sculpture carved from the stone of language, falls upon deafness.
- His mates are all out of the remake of Spinal Tap; his singing voice may be querulous, but his songs are close to brilliant.
Synonyms
petulant, complaining, pettish, touchy, testy, tetchy, waspish, prickly, crusty, peppery, fractious, fretful, irritable, cross, crabbed, crabby, crotchety, cantankerous, curmudgeonly, disagreeable, miserable, morose, on edge, edgy, impatient, bitter, moody, in a bad mood, grumpy, huffy, scratchy, out of sorts, out of temper, ill-tempered, bad-tempered, ill-natured, ill-humoured, sullen, surly, sulky, sour, churlish, bilious, liverish, dyspeptic, splenetic, choleric
informal snappish, snappy, chippy, grouchy, cranky, whingeing, whingy
British informal narky, ratty, eggy, like a bear with a sore head
North American informal sorehead, soreheaded, peckish
Australian/New Zealand informal snaky
informal, dated miffy
Derivatives
querulously
/ /ˈkwɛrjʊləsli/ adverb ...- Yet those who have achieved far less have been honoured, so it's with some legitimacy that Stewart has been grumbling that he hasn't received so much as an OBE for his work, saying querulously: ‘I don't know why I haven't got any honour.
- Ever since the 1950s film Quatermass, science fiction authors and directors have querulously pondered: what if we sent men into space - and they brought something back?
- Someone demanded querulously from the back, ‘But how do you know they're unwanted until you try?’
querulousness
- No wonder that the British have changed in character, their sturdy independence replaced with passivity, querulousness, or even, at the lower reaches of society, a sullen resentment that not enough has been or is being done for them.
- We studiously avoided that tone of spoiled and bored querulousness for which colonials were infamous.
- Nothing is more predictable than the behaviour of the drinking alcoholic - the querulousness, the delusions, the remorse, the dreams that are talked about so often and acted upon so rarely.
Origin
Late 15th century: from late Latin querulosus, from Latin querulus, from queri 'complain'.