ANIMOSITY

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does animosity mean? 

• ANIMOSITY (noun)
  The noun ANIMOSITY has 1 sense:

1. a feeling of ill will arousing active hostility

  Familiarity information: ANIMOSITY used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ANIMOSITY (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A feeling of ill will arousing active hostility

Classified under:

Nouns denoting feelings and emotions

Synonyms:

animosity; animus; bad blood

Hypernyms ("animosity" is a kind of...):

enmity; hostility; ill will (the feeling of a hostile person)

 Context examples 

The animosities between these two parties run so high, that they will neither eat, nor drink, nor talk with each other.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Yet if I was surprised by the virulence of their animosity against the French, I was even more so to hear how highly they rated them as antagonists.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

But why on earth should you be pursued with such animosity?

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Don’t arouse this man’s animosity.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Why, there's Copperfield, mother, he angrily retorted, pointing his lean finger at me, against whom all his animosity was levelled, as the prime mover in the discovery; and I did not undeceive him; there's Copperfield, would have given you a hundred pound to say less than you've blurted out!

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

From the latter circumstance it may be presumed that, whatever might be our heroine's opinion of him, his admiration of her was not of a very dangerous kind; not likely to produce animosities between the brothers, nor persecutions to the lady.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)