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Irritate vs Harass - What's the difference?

irritate | harass |

As verbs the difference between irritate and harass

is that irritate is (lb) to provoke impatience, anger, or displeasure while harass is to fatigue or to tire with repeated and exhausting efforts.

As a noun harass is

(obsolete) devastation; waste.

irritate

English

Verb

(irritat)
  • (lb) To provoke impatience, anger, or displeasure.
  • *
  • *:Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly [on a newspaper] he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.
  • (lb) To introduce irritability or irritation in.
  • (lb) To cause or induce displeasure or irritation.
  • (lb) To induce pain in (all or part of a body or organism).
  • (lb) To render null and void.
  • :(Archbishop Bramhall)
  • Synonyms

    * provoke * rile

    Antonyms

    * please

    See also

    * exasperate * peeve * disturb English intransitive verbs English transitive verbs ----

    harass

    English

    Verb

    (es)
  • To fatigue or to tire with repeated and exhausting efforts.
  • *
  • , title=(The Celebrity), chapter=4 , passage=No matter how early I came down, I would find him on the veranda, smoking cigarettes, or
  • To annoy endlessly or systematically; to molest.
  • * 1877 , (Anna Sewell), (Black Beauty) Chapter 23[http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Black_Beauty/23]
  • In my old home, I always knew that John and my master were my friends; but here, although in many ways I was well treated, I had no friend. York might have known, and very likely did know, how that rein harassed me; but I suppose he took it as a matter of course that could not be helped; at any rate nothing was done to relieve me.
  • To put excessive burdens upon; to subject to anxieties.
  • in the early 1940s.

    Synonyms

    * hassle * harry * chivy or chivvy * chevy or chevvy * beset * plague * molest * provoke

    Derived terms

    * harasser * harassment

    Noun

  • (obsolete) devastation; waste
  • (Milton)
  • (obsolete) worry; harassment
  • (Byron)