EXASPERATE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Exasperate

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/ɪgzˈæspərˌeɪt/ Listen

verb

Exasperate v. t. (past & past part. exsasperated; pres. part. exasperating)

To irritate in a high degree; to provoke; to enrage; to excite or to inflame the anger of; as, to exasperate a person or his feelings. "To exsasperate them against the king of France."

To make grievous, or more grievous or malignant; to aggravate; to imbitter; as, to exasperate enmity. "To exasperate the ways of death."

Synonyms: To irritate; provoke. See Irritate.

adjective

Exasperate adj. Exasperated; imbittered. (Obs.) "Like swallows which the exasperate dying year Sets spinning."

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Etymology of 'Exasperate'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Exasperate" Quotes from Famous Books

... to increase it. With this object in view, many Socialist agitators oppose all measures which are likely to turn the propertyless wage-earner—the "wage slave" as the Socialists like to call him, in order to exasperate him—into an owner of property, a small capitalist. That might make him a contented man. Therefore, as we have seen in Chapter XVIII., the Socialist leaders strenuously oppose "for scientific reasons" ...

— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker

... said for Batley's view, Crestwick was justified in contending that the lighter tension was more adapted to the case of the average person; but he recognized that the indulgent manner of the older men was calculated, he thought intentionally, to exasperate ...

— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss

... the prisoners, now thoroughly intimidated, took every precaution to deny the guards an opportunity for which they were so much on the alert. Consequently, being deprived of the chance to have any of us strung up on legitimate grounds, they commenced to harass and exasperate us in the hope of provoking some action which would bring us before the Commanding Officer to receive a sentence to the stake. Then, being completely foiled in this nefarious practice they did not hesitate to ...

— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... wanted to exasperate him. I have an innate passion for contradiction—my whole life has been nothing but a series of melancholy and vain contradictions of heart or reason. The presence of an enthusiast chills me with a twelfth-night cold, and I believe that constant association with a person of a ...

— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... shifts and pains we come into the world, we remember not; but 'tis commonly found no easy matter to get out of it. Many have studied to exasperate the ways of death, but fewer hours have been spent to soften that necessity.'—'Ovid, the old heroes, and the Stoicks, who were so afraid of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their soul, which they ...

— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald

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