Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective superlative form of ornery: most ornery.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • "Maybe after the harvest ... that's when they're at their orneriest, and the suicides happen -"

    THE NUMBERS 2010

  • It was just too damned big, and patently contained several thousand of the orneriest Indians in America.

    Isabelle Estelle Bruno 2010

  • It's survival of the meanest, orneriest critters you ever seen.

    Happy Wending! 2010

  • Over the years this phenomenon, which just about every parent can relate to, has gotten even more predictable: take the spotlight from YouTube kids and the orneriest, most recessive child might actually start chiming in with detailed descriptions of his or her day.

    Childhood Unbound Ron Taffel 2009

  • Over the years this phenomenon, which just about every parent can relate to, has gotten even more predictable: take the spotlight from YouTube kids and the orneriest, most recessive child might actually start chiming in with detailed descriptions of his or her day.

    Childhood Unbound Ron Taffel 2009

  • We can now add John Thain-Goldman Sachs and NYSE alumnus, the onetime orneriest sheriff come to town at Merrill Lynch-to this list.

    Another Eminence Tarnished by the Bear 2009

  • Survival not just of the fittest, but the fastest, meanest, orneriest SOB's in the market.

    The essential paradigm of cyberspace 2006

  • So he was an absolutely friendless, isolated, mean, twisted and angry man, the orneriest SOB I have ever met.

    The Real America Glenn Beck 2003

  • So he was an absolutely friendless, isolated, mean, twisted and angry man, the orneriest SOB I have ever met.

    The Real America Glenn Beck 2003

  • Joe Martin Erber, whose mother had also been a Davidson, once described one member of the Meridian branch of the family as “the orneriest Jew I ever met”; another member, Meyer Davidson, was so outspoken that he had come within seconds of having his house blown up by the Ku Klux Klan on the night of June 29, 1968, before FBI agents, who had been tipped off, intercepted the would-be bombers.

    Confederacy of Silence Richard Rubin 2002

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