Adjective

(en adjective)

Constantly complaining; fretful, whining.

* , King Henry V , act 3, scene 7:

Orleans: What a wretched and peevish fellow is this king of England, to mope with his fat-brained followers so far out of his knowledge!

* 1813 , , Pride and Prejudice , ch. 41:

[T]he luckless Kitty continued in the parlour repining at her fate in terms as unreasonable as her accent was peevish .

* 1917 , , "The Mixer" in The Man With Two Left Feet and Other Stories :

At first he was quite peevish . "What's the idea," he said, "coming and spoiling a man's beauty-sleep? Get out."

Adjective

(en adjective)

(obsolete) That captures; especially, (of an argument, words etc.) designed to capture or entrap in misleading arguments; sophistical.

* 1605 , (William Shakespeare), :

I know I loue in vaine, striue against hope: / Yet in this captious , and intemible Siue / I still poure in the waters of my loue / And lacke not to loose still.

* 1784 , (William Cowper), "A Review of Schools", in Poems , 1859 ed., page 219:

A captious question, sir, and yours is one, / Deserves an answer similar, or none.

* {{quote-book, 1815, date=March 24, chapter=To William Lisle Bowles, author=(Samuel Taylor Coleridge), pageurl=http://books.google.com/books?id=P98V-3-qzp0C&pg=PA558, page=558, edition=2000 Oxford ed., isbn=0198187459, title=Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

, passage=Were you aware that in your discourse last Sunday you attributed the captious Problem of the Sadducees to the Pharisees, as a proof of the obscure and sensual doctrines of the latter? }}

Having a disposition to find fault unreasonably or to raise petty objections; cavilling, nitpicky

* 1968 , Sidney Monas, translating Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866):

But Peter Petrovich did not accept this retort. On the contrary, he became all the more captious and irritable, as though he were just hitting his stride.

* 2009 , Anne Karpf, The Guardian , 24 Jan 2009:

The "Our Bold" column, nitpicking at errors in other periodicals, can look merely captious , and its critics often seem to be wildly and collectively wrong-headed.