Rebarbative
adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Irritating, repellent.
"Poliziano took great pleasure in incorporating the new myths, facts, and variant readings he uncovered as a scholar in his own Latin poems and letters — and in pointing out that he had done so in his most rebarbative technical monographs."
- 1 serving or tending to repel wordnet
Example
More examples"Poliziano took great pleasure in incorporating the new myths, facts, and variant readings he uncovered as a scholar in his own Latin poems and letters — and in pointing out that he had done so in his most rebarbative technical monographs."
Etymology
From French rébarbatif, rébarbative (“repellent, disagreeable”), from Middle French rebarber (“to oppose”), ultimately from Latin barba (“beard”), literally “to stand beard to beard against”.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.