irritate
Pronunciation
  • IPA: /ˈɪɹɪteɪt/
Verb

irritate (irritates, present participle irritating; past and past participle irritated)

  1. (transitive) To provoke impatience, anger, or displeasure in.
    • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546 ↗; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., […], [1933], OCLC 2666860 ↗, page 0056 ↗:
      Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.
  2. (intransitive) To cause or induce displeasure or irritation.
  3. (transitive) To induce pain in (all or part of a body or organism).
  4. (transitive, obsolete, Scotland, legal) To render null and void.
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