ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Cross-grained

Definition, Meaning & Examples

Part of speech adjective

Quick meaning: Cross-grained is an adjective meaning (of timber) Having an irregular rather than a parallel grain.

Meaning

(of timber) Having an irregular rather than a parallel grain.

More Meanings

  1. (by extension) Difficult to deal with; contrary or troublesome.

Example Sentences

It is quite wonderful to me, in such a cross-grained, hardening, and harsh world as ours, where she can have contrived to keep so much of open, fresh, and kindly feeling.
It was my old cross-grained companion, Professor Summerlee. "What!" he cried. "Don't tell me that you have had one of these preposterous telegrams for oxygen?" I exhibited it.
For five minutes, Tommy sat on the bed in the dingy room next door. His heart was beating violently. He had risked all on this throw. How would they decide? And all the while that this agonized questioning went on within him, he talked flippantly to Conrad, enraging the cross-grained doorkeeper to the point of homicidal mania.

Synonyms for cross-grained

Depending on context, synonyms include stubborn, contrarious, uneven.

Related Words

Related dictionary entries include stubborn, contrarious, uneven, crossgrained, grained, multigrooved.

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Sources & Attribution

FreeDictionaryAPI.com / Wiktionary · Original source · CC BY-SA 4.0

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