adjective
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bad-tempered
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bilious or causing biliousness
Usage
What does choleric mean? Choleric means easily angered or generally bad-tempered. People described as choleric are grouchy all the time and prone to getting into arguments, often for very little reason. The word choleric comes from the medieval notion that people’s personalities are based on the balance of four different types of elemental fluids in their body, called humors. A choleric person was thought to be generally irritable due to the amount of yellow bile, or choler, in their body. Example: She was the kind of choleric person who would get into a fight over anything and everything.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Etymology
Origin of choleric
1300–50; Middle English colerik < Medieval Latin colericus bilious, Latin cholericus < Greek cholerikós. See cholera, -ic
Explanation
Are you easy to tick off? Known to have a short fuse? Then, you could be described as choleric. Don't worry; it's not a disease related to cholera. Choleric just means you're testy and irritable. Before the advent of modern medicine, most folks believed that health and disease were the result of the balance of "humors" in the body. If you were quick to anger, you were thought to have too much choler in your system. You were called choleric. W. C. Fields, Richard Nixon, and Ebenezer Scrooge are just a few people famous for being choleric, easy to tick off.
Vocabulary lists containing choleric
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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The New SAT: Words to Capture Tone
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The SAT: Words to Capture Tone, List 8
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
As Brent Griffiths at Business Insider explains, the "approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic."
From Salon • Nov. 1, 2023
Their Choleric debuts in “The Four Temperaments” and their returns to the tall girl in “Rubies” showed their different ways of holding the stage, of etching themselves into the music.
From New York Times • Mar. 2, 2022
Choleric lists are another of Ellmann's trademarks, but apart from his enumeration of reasons for breaking up with Gertrude, Harry's lists are mild-mannered.
From The Guardian • Feb. 15, 2013
In more than one performance of “The Four Temperaments,” Ms. Reichlen was the best, most sharply explosive Choleric in many years.
From New York Times • Jun. 1, 2010
Belinchon was called "Don Quixote," and Don Rudesindo "Sancho," Sinforoso the "Marquis of Kicks," and Pe�a "Captain Choleric," etc.
From The Fourth Estate, vol. 2 by Palacio Vald?s, Armando
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
