crabby
Americanadjective
adjective
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of crabby
Explanation
If you're in a really bad or irritable mood, you can say you're crabby. Loud talking and laughing during a movie might make you crabby. Some unpleasant, bad-tempered people seem to be crabby all the time, while others just become crabby when they're stuck in rush hour traffic. You might decide that the sound of kids yelling and laughing makes you too crabby to be a good elementary school teacher. The original, 16th century meaning of crabby was "crooked" or "rough," with the "cranky" meaning arising in the United States around 1776.
Vocabulary lists containing crabby
Rules
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Al Capone Does My Shirts
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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.
See Examples For:
The bots responded to lines of cars and never got crabby, Baartman said.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 16, 2026
“I am such a crabby old man now, but it’s like, there’s parking, you can park when we have to go out,” Richter says.
From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 27, 2026
He added passengers jokingly pointed out the "shellfish" crab had its feet on the seat, while others called out the crabby commuter for fare dodging.
From BBC ● Sep. 19, 2025
If you try to pay as little as possible no matter what, you can wind up with crabby kids who aren’t having fun and go out of their way to make sure you’re not, either.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 11, 2023
He was a tall, narrow, disconsolate man who moved with a crabby listlessness.
From "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller
Crustaceans have repeatedly gone from having a cylindrical body plan with a big tail — characteristic of a shrimp or a lobster — to a flatter, rounder, crabbier look, with a much less prominent tail.
From Scientific American ● Jun. 1, 2023
Kelly was crabbier than usual afterward, refusing to address the one constant stain on his time in Westwood: defensive coordinator Jerry Azzinaro.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 31, 2021
They all know that happy and emotionally intelligent workplaces deliver results that crabbier organizations can’t.
From Forbes ● Oct. 22, 2014
He’s achieved many of his goals—Trudy had the baby, he got a bigger offe, he’s dominating Roger—but he seems to get crabbier by the week.
From Slate ● Apr. 16, 2012
“You’re always crabbier when your eyes are black — I expect it then,” I went on.
From "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer
It was about a month later that a legal-looking letter arrived, directed to him, beautifully written in the roundest and crabbiest of engrossing hands.
From The Vast Abyss The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam by Fenn, George Manville
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.
