abrasive
adjective
Pronunciation
uh-BRAY-siv
Definition
1 - tending to wear away by rubbing
2 - causing irritation
Examples
Coworkers tolerated ane's abrasive personality because she was brilliant, but many privately wished she could learn to be a bit more polite.
"He comes across as direct, confident but not cocky or abrasive." — Steve Flowers, The Jacksonville (Alabama) News, 23 Feb. 2016
Did You Know?
Once upon a time, English had two different but similarly derived words meaning "to wear down": abrade and abrase. However, in this fairy tale, only one of the two had a happy ending; while abrade remains a familiar word to modern English speakers, abrase has become quite rare. And yet, abrase lives on in its descendantabrasive, which was formed by combining the verb with the -ive suffix. Both of the verbs, and by extension abrasive, can be traced back to the Latin verb abradere, meaning "to scrape off."Abradere in turn is a combination of ab- andradere, meaning "to scrape."
Name That Synonym
Fill in the blanks to create a synonym of abradethat can also mean "to censure scathingly": e _ c _ _ i _ te.
No comments:
Post a Comment