shrewish
/ˈʃruːɪʃ
/adjective
(Of a woman) bad-tempered or aggressively assertive: his shrewish wife...
- Being nasty, rude, shrewish and creepy was very fun to do - I simply pretended to be in a bad mood each time the camera rolled.
- The shrewish Katharina gives her final speech of submission out of real love for Petruchio, apparently because she realizes he's as mixed up as she is.
- He intends to woo her perfectly, by telling her how lovely she is, when she looks shrewish, how beautifully she plays, when she makes horrid noises, and more.
Synonyms
bad-tempered, quarrelsome, nasty, mean, spiteful, sharp-tongued, scolding, nagging, peevish, catty, snappy, vindictive, aggressive;
venomous, rancorous, bitchy, snide, backbiting, petulant, vixenish, cattish;
complaining, grumbling, fault-finding, carping, cavilling, criticizing, captious
Derivatives
shrewishly
- One could see that he felt oppressed by the shrewishly seductive manipulations of Anna, a widow who recklessly inspired a romance between one of the king's countless concubines and a shirtless youth.
- Mary is brittle and bright, using her feminine wiles to get her way and being shrewishly clever to advance her agendas.
- Easily half this movie's running time is going to be devoted to the two of them either bickering shrewishly or falling implausibly in love.
shrewishness
- Leigh's Petruchio is too strong to fall for a woman who is blatantly manipulative rather than a match for his own true shrewishness.
- Curiously, in Peter Barnes's breezy screenplay, Lot's wife is saddled with most of the shrewishness usually attributed to Noah's wife, Naamah, who is supposed in legend to have refused to board the ark.
- The taming of Katherine is not a women's shrewishness being cured as much as it is a woman being taught the rules of the ‘patriarchal game’.