asperity

American  

[uh-sper-i-tee] / əˈspɛr ɪ ti /

noun

asperities plural

1. harshness or sharpness of tone, temper, or manner; severity; acrimony.

   The cause of her anger did not warrant such asperity.

   Synonyms:

   astringency, bitterness, acerbity

   Antonyms:

   cheerfulness, affability

2. hardship; difficulty; rigor.

   the asperities of polar weather.

3. roughness of surface; unevenness.

4. something rough or harsh.

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asperity British  

/ æˈspɛrɪtɪ /

noun

1. roughness or sharpness of temper

2. roughness or harshness of a surface, sound, taste, etc

3. a condition hard to endure; affliction

4. physics the elastically compressed region of contact between two surfaces caused by the normal force

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• asperities
  plural

Etymology

Origin of asperity

1200–50; late Middle English asperite (< Anglo-French ) < Latin asperitās, equivalent to asper rough + -itās -ity; replacing Middle English asprete < Anglo-French, Old French < Latin

Explanation

Asperity is the harsh tone or behavior people exhibit when they’re angry, impatient, or just miserable. Did your supervisor snap “Late again!” when you showed up 20 minutes after your shift was supposed to start? She's speaking with asperity. The harshness that asperity implies can also apply to conditions, like "the asperities of life in a bomb shelter." The word can be used even more literally to refer to surfaces, as in "the asperity of an unfinished edge." But, most often, you will see asperity used in reference to grumpy voices or irritable behavior.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

asperity asperities

When the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno doubted the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, Celan replied with the asperity of one who knew where barbarism had lodged.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 5, 2026

On a re-read, Orwell’s narrative holds up, in large part due to the asperity of the prose and the prescient description of how fascism can creep into any society that takes freedom for granted.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 20, 2023

She mentions, with some asperity, a phone call from New York when “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” appeared in The New Yorker in 1963.

From New York Times ● Oct. 21, 2021

Arch, cracking with energetic, even contemptuous asperity, it is a world apart from “Everybody.”

From Washington Post ● Jun. 17, 2021

“Now where,” he answered with asperity, “where except in the great tea shop on the main street of the town?”

From "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck

Compared to smooth faults, injection-induced slip on rough faults produces spatially localized clusters of Acoustic Emissions occurring around highly stressed asperities.

From Science Daily ● Jan. 18, 2024

Eco mingled with Milanese avant-garde writers, musicians and painters, and developed a love for late James Joyce, the atonal asperities of Karlheinz Stockhausen and the impenetrable symbolist verse of late Mallarmé.

From The Guardian ● Feb. 20, 2016

Dawkins’s bracing asperities are now routinely met in kind: ‘Puffed up, self-regarding, vain, prickly and militant’ was one columnist’s string of adjectives for him.

From Salon ● Aug. 15, 2015

Coseismic triggering of compact brittle asperities embedded in the ductile fault matrix could explain the relative locations of HF and lower-frequency slip and the apparent lack of HF radiators at shallow depths.

From Science Magazine ● Jun. 16, 2011

These asperities are wearing away, under the attrition of a more extended and enlightened intercourse. 

From A Tour throughout South Wales and Monmouthshire by Barber, J. T.