feisty
- full of animation, energy, or courage; spirited; spunky; plucky: The champion is faced with a feisty challenger.
- ill-tempered; pugnacious.
- troublesome; difficult: feisty legal problems.
Origin of feisty
Examples from the Web for feisty
Contemporary Examples
The feisty airline is the brainchild of entrepreneur Tony Fernandes, a Malaysian of Indian descent who also is a British citizen.
The House caucus appears to be far more populist, feisty, and ready to push the debate on economic issues than it has in the past.
Sitting at a cozy café in the center of Tel Aviv, Kallai looks nothing like the feisty woman he plays on screen.
She has since become an accomplished and feisty human rights lawyer.
The feisty feminist in me has often warred with the longtime gamer in me.
Historical Examples
I get sort of feisty and want to dav-il her by makin' you look pretty.
The Power and the GloryGrace MacGowan Cooke
On an impulse he stepped up to the small man who began a grin of recognition, a grin that transformed his feisty face.
MercenaryDallas McCord Reynolds
feisty
- lively, resilient, and self-reliant
- US and Canadian frisky
- US and Canadian irritable
Word Origin
Word Origin and History for feisty
adj.
1896, "aggressive, exuberant, touchy," American English, with -y (2) + feist "small dog," earlier fice, fist (American English, 1805); short for fysting curre "stinking cur," attested from 1520s, from Middle English fysten, fisten "break wind" (mid-15c.); related to Old English fisting "stink," from Proto-Germanic *fistiz- "a fart," said to be from PIE *pezd- (see fart), but there are difficulties.
The 1811 slang dictionary defines fice as "a small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears; frequently by old ladies charged on their lap-dogs." Cf. also Danish fise "to blow, to fart," and obsolete English aske-fise, "fire-tender," literally "ash-blower" (early 15c.), from an unrecorded Norse source, used in Middle English for a kind of bellows, but originally "a term of reproach among northern nations for an unwarlike fellow who stayed at home in the chimney corner" [OED].