crabbed (See crab)
bed adj : perversely irritable [syn: crabby, cross, fussy, grouchy, grumpy, bad-tempered, ill-tempered]crab

1 decapod having eyes on short stalks and a broad flattened carapace with a small abdomen folded under the thorax and pincers

2 a quarrelsome grouch [syn: crabby person]

3 (astrology) a person who is born while the sun is in Cancer [syn: Cancer]

4 the fourth sign of the zodiac; the sun is in this sign from about June 21 to July 22 [syn: Cancer, Cancer the Crab]

5 the edible flesh of any of various crabs [syn: crabmeat]

6 infests the pubic region of the human body [syn: crab louse, pubic louse, Phthirius pubis]

7 a stroke of the oar that either misses the water or digs too deeply; "he caught a crab and lost the race"

1 direct (an aircraft) into a crosswind

2 scurry sideways like a crab

3 fish for crab

4 complain; "What was he hollering about?" [syn: gripe, grouse, beef, squawk, bellyache, holler] [also: crabbing, crabbed]

English

Pronunciation

• /kræbd/

  Rhymes with: -æbd

Adjective

1. Bad-tempered or cantankerous.
2. Cramped, bent.
   • 1800(?) Robert Southey, Winter

     A wrinkled crabbed man they picture thee,

     Old Winter, with a rugged beard as grey

     As the long moss upon the apple-tree;

3. In the context of "of handwriting": Crowded together and difficult to read.

Derived terms

• crabbedly
• crabbedness

Verb

crabbed

1. past of crab

Byzantine, acerb, acerbate, acerbic, acescent, anile, balled up, bearish, beyond one, bitchy, blunt, brusque, cankered, cantankerous, choleric, churlish, complex, complicated, confounded, confused, convoluted, crab, cramp, cranky, cross, cross-grained, crusty, cussed, daedal, debilitated, decrepit, devious, difficult, disagreeable, doddered, doddering, doddery, dour, dry, elaborate, embrangled, entangled, excitable, feeble, feisty, fossilized, fouled up, fractious, garbled, gerontal, gerontic, gloomy, glum, green, gruff, hard, hard to understand, huffish, huffy, implicated, infirm, intricate, involuted, involved, irascible, irritable, jumbled, knotted, knotty, labyrinthian, labyrinthine, loused up, many-faceted, matted, mazy, mean, meandering, messed up, mixed up, morose, mossbacked, moth-eaten, mucked up, multifarious, mummylike, obfuscated, obscure, obscured, ornery, overtechnical, palsied, papery-skinned, perplexed, perverse, pickled, pungent, ramified, ravaged with age, rickety, roundabout, run to seed, rusty, saturnine, scrambled, screwed up, sec, senile, shaky, shriveled, snappish, snarled, sour, sour as vinegar, soured, sourish, spiteful, spleeny, splenetic, stricken in years, subtle, sulky, surly, tangled, tangly, tart, tartish, testy, timeworn, tottering, tottery, tough, twisted, ugly, unripe, unsweet, unsweetened, vinegarish, vinegary, waspish, weak, withered, wizened