Irritable

How to spell irritable

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce irritable

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does irritable mean?

1. adjectiveEasily annoyed or made angry, especially over small things.

Irritable in a sentence

• A poor night of sleep left him irritable all morning at the office.

• She becomes irritable when meetings run long past lunch.

Where does irritable come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb irritare, meaning 'to provoke, excite, or annoy', from which English also took the related verb 'irritate'. The Latin form yielded irritabilis, literally 'easily provoked', and that adjective passed into English in the early 1600s, partly with help from the French irritable. From the start it carried two related ideas: the everyday sense of a person who is quick to lose patience, and a more technical sense in medicine and biology describing tissue or a nerve that responds readily to a stimulus. The spelling preserves the double r of the Latin root and finishes with -able rather than -ible, which is the usual trap, since the ending is built on a complete-feeling stem. Remembering that 'irritate' has the same double r and the same -ate stem helps keep both spellings steady.

How the word is built

• irrit- (from Latin irritare: to provoke or annoy)
• -able (capable of, prone to)