ornery
Pronunciation: /ˈɔːnəɹi/
The English word “ornery” has 3 meanings listed here.
adjective
- Disagreeable, stubborn, and troublesome to deal with; cantankerous.
- Troublesome to deal with in a good way; mischievous, prankish, teasing.
- Ordinary, commonplace; hence, inferior, plain-looking, unpleasant.
Etymology
A contracted or dialectal pronunciation of ordinary. Sense 3 (“ordinary, commonplace”) was the earliest sense; the meaning of the word then shifted to “inferior, plain-looking, unpleasant”—presumably due to ordinariness—and finally to sense 1 (“disagreeable, stubborn, and troublesome to deal with”).
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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.