How to Use peevish in a Sentence

peevish

adjective
  • I would rather figure things out on my own than ask that peevish librarian for help.
  • And like any 5-year old, Hrysha is peevish at times or complains about going to school.
    — Alice Martins, Washington Post, 26 Mar. 2023
  • The whole thing feels fairly peevish—that is to say, properly British.
    — Sam Knight, The New Yorker, 31 Jan. 2020
  • There’s a peevish tone, though, that soon seeps into the DNA of the book.
    — Corey Seymour, Vogue, 26 Oct. 2017
  • In the end, though, God answers with a thunderous, if not peevish, rebuke.
    — Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 2019
  • This is an odd, peevish book — but certainly not an uninteresting one.
    — Lisa Schwarzbaum, New York Times, 1 June 2016
  • DeSantis sometimes comes across as peevish and defensive, has made a misstatement or two and was mocked for struggling to put on a mask.
    — Fox News, 29 May 2020
  • For all that, his Arthur remains a lowly outsider, with a downcast gaze, a peevish temper, and a deep well of melancholy that never feels one-note.
    — Justin Chang, The New Yorker, 28 Mar. 2024
  • One reason is the vague wish that an annoying question will provoke a memorably peevish answer that will be news for a day before everybody forgets it.
    — Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 26 Jan. 2022
  • But more than a century and a half after Crum’s peevish inspiration, the potato chip isn’t just one of our most popular foods but also our most versatile.
    — Brandon Tensley, Smithsonian Magazine, 6 Jan. 2022
  • And then there’s the senators’ rank partisan grandstanding and peevish political payback.
    — Robert Gehrke, The Salt Lake Tribune, 14 Apr. 2021
  • The preternaturally peevish Pentecostal preacher is back and absent as ever.
    — Kristen Baldwin and Lester Fabian Brathwaite, EW.com, 6 Sep. 2023
  • The childishness of his expressions infantilized a genuinely vicious regime, painting it as more peevish than petrifying.
    — Fintan O’Toole, The New York Review of Books, 9 Apr. 2026
  • In the meantime, however, there will be no shortage of conflicting diagnoses, with pockets of consensus surrounded by a few peevish second and third opinions.
    — Justin Chang, latimes.com, 15 Dec. 2017
  • The other is the sometimes bumbling, frequently ineffective and often peevish politician who showed up Wednesday night, operating on the fly.
    — Anchorage Daily News, 21 Feb. 2020
  • The book is a chronicle of distractions and peevish excuses that also shows how the consuming labor of procrastination became a crucial part of the novel’s texture.
    — Sam Sacks, WSJ, 14 Aug. 2020
  • The actor nicely captures Higgins’s peevish hauteur and invincible self-assurance.
    — Don Aucoin, BostonGlobe.com, 20 Apr. 2023
  • Once the peevish Portuguese actually arrived at Stamford Bridge, Gallas was an integral part of back-to-back title victories.
    — SI.com, 31 Oct. 2019
  • The famously peevish ex-Chicago Cubs manager Leo Durocher was careful to keep an extra set of front teeth in his pocket in case someone took particular umbrage at his taunts.
    — Tom Saler, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 29 July 2017
  • Judith Lightfoot Clarke and Greg Wood carry themselves with peevish authority as the Butley, oozing entitlement.
    — Christopher Arnott, Hartford Courant, 28 Apr. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'peevish.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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