(click/touch triangles for details)
Definition
a bad-tempered person — typically an old man- a curmudgeon with a keen eye for hypocrisy
- Luma has even become friendly with Emanuel Ransom, the town curmudgeon, bonding over their shared admiration of Hillary Clinton.Warren St. John -- Outcasts United
- Make way! the Sieur Curmudgeon is marrying Mademoiselle Clutch-penny.Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables
- They were like curmudgeonly old friends who would never admit that they liked me yet came round to see me all the time.Yann Martel -- Life of Pi
- 'I'm sure she's an old curmudgeon.Agatha Christie -- Early Cases Of Hercule Poirot
- The reporters assumed that Smith was just being curmudgeonly, but there was likely more to it than that.Laura Hillenbrand -- Seabiscuit
- Curmudgeons, sadists ....Tracy Kidder -- Mountains Beyond Mountains
- No, I'll buy the gayest gown I can get, and dance over the old curmudgeon's grave in it.Henry Fielding -- Tom Jones
- I may carp about feeling cornered by Nathaniel, as is my right as a curmudgeonly columnist, but there's nothing boring about the adventure I'm on.Steve Lopez -- The Soloist
- It also took me that long to understand what Jeb was up to, what the motivation was behind his switch from the courteous host to the curmudgeonly taskmaster.Stephenie Meyer -- The Host
- It had a curmudgeonly fuel transfer valve that Pillsbury and Douglas had to finesse into place, lest it stick wide open, slow an engine, or trigger a deafening backfire.Laura Hillenbrand -- Unbroken
- Kerry the atheist curmudgeon, who hated how commercialized Christmas had become and so threw an annual Merry Anti-Christmas Celebration at the club, where he held a contest for which band could play the most distorted versions of Christmas carols.Gayle Forman -- If I Stay
- In fifty years I would be seventy-four, an old curmudgeon with a hairless, toothless head; the geriatric remnant of the forties, whose blood had dried, whose youth had withered, whose dreams had died like the grasses and washed out on a spring tide.Pat Conroy -- The Water is Wide
- The Vicar himself seemed to wear rather a changed aspect, as most men do when acquaintances made elsewhere see them for the first time in their own homes; some indeed showing like an actor of genial parts disadvantageously cast for the curmudgeon in a new piece.George Eliot -- Middlemarch
- Dr. Percepied, whose loud voice and bushy eyebrows enabled him to play to his heart's content the part of 'double-dealer,' a part to which he was not, otherwise, adapted, without in the least degree compromising his unassailable and quite unmerited reputation of being a kind-hearted old curmudgeon, could make the Cure and everyone else laugh until they cried by saying in a harsh voice: "What d'ye say to this, now?Marcel Proust -- Swann's Way