adjective

• 1Bad-tempered or irritable.

  ‘he was a choleric, self-important little man’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Even Maureen, who generally treats her choleric partner with girlish forbearance, at one point asks: ‘Why do you always shout like that, Rolf?’’
  • ‘While Ralph was the choleric loser, Ed was the lucky buffoon.’
  • ‘The negative side came about largely through his personality which is described as ‘occasionally choleric, quarrelsome, and given to invectives.’’
  • ‘Indeed, the political system accommodated the interests and choleric attitudes of both men with little difficulty.’
  • ‘In Churchill's darkest hour, the future PM is reduced to a choleric, drunken, melancholic old man, reviled and mocked as a warmonger by the Establishment and the British public alike.’

  Synonyms

  bad-tempered, irascible, irritable, grumpy, grouchy, crotchety, tetchy, testy, crusty, cantankerous, curmudgeonly, ill-tempered, ill-natured, ill-humoured, peevish, cross, fractious, disagreeable, pettish, crabbed, crabby, waspish, prickly, peppery, touchy, scratchy, splenetic, shrewish, short-tempered, hot-tempered, quick-tempered, dyspeptic, bilious, liverish, cross-grained

  View synonyms

  1. 1.1Influenced by or predominating in the humor called choler.
     ‘a choleric disposition’
     More example sentences

     • ‘‘Adding fuel to the fire’ is Culpeper's way of saying that the herb strengthens the choleric humour associated with fever.’
     • ‘Imbalance of the humours resulted in various temperaments, thus the dominance of black bile causes melancholy; blood, sanguine temperament; phlegm, a phlegmatic temperament; or yellow bile, a choleric temperament.’
     • ‘Rather, he is choleric in temperament: he is passionate, intemperate, and prone to rashness and anger.’
     • ‘As a choleric sign it is prone to fevers and is linked to yellow-jaundice and sore eyes.’
     • ‘The sanguine humour is the principal humour of the blood which embodies the other three humours: the choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic within it.’