QUARRELSOME

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does quarrelsome mean? 

• QUARRELSOME (adjective)
  The adjective QUARRELSOME has 1 sense:

1. given to quarreling

  Familiarity information: QUARRELSOME used as an adjective is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• QUARRELSOME (adjective)

Sense 1

Meaning:

Given to quarreling

Context example:

quarrelsome when drinking

Similar:

argumentative (given to or characterized by argument)

Derivation:

quarrelsomeness (an inclination to be quarrelsome and contentious)

 Context examples 

—er—quarrelsome, and harsh measures are necessary.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

I wish you would not be so quarrelsome.

(Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen)

She could not be complying, she dreaded being quarrelsome; her heroism reached only to silence.

(Emma, by Jane Austen)

Elizabeth soon perceived, that though this great lady was not in commission of the peace of the county, she was a most active magistrate in her own parish, the minutest concerns of which were carried to her by Mr. Collins; and whenever any of the cottagers were disposed to be quarrelsome, discontented, or too poor, she sallied forth into the village to settle their differences, silence their complaints, and scold them into harmony and plenty.

(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)

Joe Berks, who had grown noisier and more quarrelsome as the evening went on, tried to clamber across the table, with horrible blasphemies, to come to blows with an old Jew named Fighting Yussef, who had plunged into the discussion.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He wondered to hear me talk of such chargeable and expensive wars; that certainly we must be a quarrelsome people, or live among very bad neighbours, and that our generals must needs be richer than our kings.

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

He could not fail to see that the men with whom he was thrown in contact, rough-tongued, fierce and quarrelsome as they were, were yet of deeper nature and of more service in the world than the ox-eyed brethren who rose and ate and slept from year's end to year's end in their own narrow, stagnant circle of existence.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye, bearing witness to his excesses over-night (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink), and he, with a shaking hand, endeavouring to find the needful shillings in one or other of the pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife, with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off rating him.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

He's as clever as they make 'em—a full-charged battery of force and vitality, but a quarrelsome, ill-conditioned faddist, and unscrupulous at that. He had gone the length of faking some photographs over the South American business.

(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

What a strange, unaccountable character!—for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.

(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)