Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Relating to or caused by temperament.
- adjective Excessively sensitive or irritable; moody.
- adjective Likely to perform unpredictably; undependable.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Of or pertaining to temperament.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective rare Of or pertaining to temperament; constitutional.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective of, related to, or caused by
temperament - adjective subject to
changing andunpredictable emotional states ;moody ,capricious ; sometimes used figuratively to describe user-unfriendly or unstable machines or software that are either complicated and/or have poorly written instructions and are subsequently difficult to operate.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective relating to or caused by temperament
- adjective likely to perform unpredictably
- adjective subject to sharply varying moods
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word temperamental.
Examples
-
Reveka, honest and temperamental, is easily outmaneuvered, and so it is usually Reveka who joylessly plunks a silver tray on the coffee table and retreats in a sulk.
-
And yet there is a certain temperamental similarity, evident enough now, though it would not have been so a dozen years ago.
Inside the Whale 1940
-
There, he became known as a temperamental experimentalist, obsessive and fearless.
NPR Topics: News 2010
-
But the truth is that we’ve always had it; it’s just that it used to be called being a brat, and then it was called temperamental, and now it’s called something else.
You Raising Your Child Michael F. Roizen 2010
-
But the truth is that we’ve always had it; it’s just that it used to be called being a brat, and then it was called temperamental, and now it’s called something else.
You Raising Your Child Michael F. Roizen 2010
-
But the truth is that we’ve always had it; it’s just that it used to be called being a brat, and then it was called temperamental, and now it’s called something else.
You Raising Your Child Michael F. Roizen 2010
-
But the truth is that we’ve always had it; it’s just that it used to be called being a brat, and then it was called temperamental, and now it’s called something else.
You Raising Your Child Michael F. Roizen 2010
-
The main temperamental difference between Blair and Brown is that Blair really is/was a neo-Gladstonian, and there’s no sense of that kind of lofty paternalism in his approach to governance.
-
Yaks are known to be temperamental, which is why I gave them plenty of respect even as I clamored closer for photographs.
-
CZ: You have been called temperamental, eccentric and tempestuous.
Patricia Zohn: Off the C(H)uff: Zaha Hadid and Her MAXXI Museum in Rome 2010
sonofgroucho commented on the word temperamental
That WeirdNet definition is so helpful.
Maybe I'm just being temperamental....
December 17, 2007
kewpid commented on the word temperamental
But it is undeniably correct :)
December 17, 2007