asperity
Other forms: asperities
Asperity is the harsh tone or behavior people exhibit when they’re angry, impatient, or just miserable. Did your supervisor snap “Late again!” when you showed up 20 minutes after your shift was supposed to start? She's speaking with asperity.
The harshness that asperity implies can also apply to conditions, like "the asperities of life in a bomb shelter." The word can be used even more literally to refer to surfaces, as in "the asperity of an unfinished edge." But, most often, you will see asperity used in reference to grumpy voices or irritable behavior.
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harshness of mannersynonyms: sharpnesstype of:ill naturea disagreeable, irritable, or malevolent disposition
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something hard to endure“the asperity of northern winters”synonyms: grimness, hardship, rigor, rigorousness, rigour, rigourousness, severeness, severitytypes:sternnessthe quality (as of scenery) being grim and gloomy and forbiddingtype of:
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Vocabulary lists containing asperity
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
After having a child out of wedlock, Hester Prynne is shunned by her Puritan community and forced to wear a scarlet "A" on her clothing — but Hester is not the only one who has transgressed. This classic novel explores guilt, sin, and hypocrisy.
Jay Aubrey Jones pronounced more than 36,000 words for Vocabulary.com (including laurel). Here are some of the most esoteric. See if you can spell them while listening to the dulcet tones of Jay's voice!