All 4 Uses

ornery
in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(Auto-generated)

The Acutes look spooked and uneasy when he laughs, the way kids look in a schoolroom when one ornery kid is raising too much hell with the teacher out of the room and they're all scared the teacher might pop back in and take it into her head to make them all stay after.†
Chpt 3

ornery = easily annoyed and quick to complain and argue
He's that way all through lunch, and at one o'clock he's the first one in his seat for the meeting, his eyes blue and ornery from his place in the corner.†
Chpt 9 *
Others figure he's letting her relax, then he's going to spring something new on her, something wilder and more ornery than ever.†
Chpt 18
They all laughed about that when he was around, but when be was off the ward at ET or OT or PT, or when he was in the Nurses' Station getting bawled out about something, matching her fixed plastic smile with his big ornery grin, they weren't exactly laughing.†
Chpt 26

Definitions:

(1) (ornery as in: is ornery when she first wakes up)
quick to get annoyed, complain, argue, and be uncooperative
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
Much more rarely (and seldom any more), ornery can describe someone as "low down", coarse, or unrefined. Mark Twain often used the word in that manner as in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn where he wrote: "The other fellow was about thirty, and dressed about as ornery." and "The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling."