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anger

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈæŋɡə//
  • United Kingdom/[ˈæŋɡə] ~ [ˈaŋɡə]/
  • United Kingdom//ˈaŋɡə//
  • United Kingdom/[ˈaŋɡə]/
  • //ˈæːŋɡə//

A strong and unpleasant feeling of displeasure, hostility, or antagonism, usually combined with an urge to yell, curse, damage or destroy things, or harm living beings, often stemming from perceived provocation, hurt, threat, insults, unfair or unjust treatment, or an undesired situation.

noun

  1. 1

    A strong and unpleasant feeling of displeasure, hostility, or antagonism, usually combined with an urge to yell, curse, damage or destroy things, or harm living beings, often stemming from perceived provocation, hurt, threat, insults, unfair or unjust treatment, or an undesired situation.

    vent one's anger

    relieve one's anger

    manage one's anger

    soothe one's anger

  2. 2

    obsoletePain or stinging.

    It heals the Wounds that Sin hath made; and takes away the Anger of the Sore; […]

    I immediately made the Experiment, ſetting the Moxa where the firſt Violence of my Pain began, which was the Joint of the great Toe, and where the greateſt Anger and Soreneſs ſtill continued, [...]

Etymology

From Middle English anger (“grief, pain, trouble, affliction, vexation, sorrow, wrath”), from Old Norse angr, ǫngr (“affliction, sorrow”) (compare Old Norse ang, ǫng (“troubled”)), from Proto-Germanic *angazaz (“grief, sorrow”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂enǵʰ- (“narrow, tied together”). Cognate with Danish anger (“regret, remorse”), Norwegian Bokmål anger (“regret, remorse”), Swedish ånger (“regret”), Icelandic angur (“trouble”), Old English ange, enge (“narrow, close, straitened, constrained, confined, vexed, troubled, sorrowful, anxious, oppressive, severe, painful, cruel”), German Angst (“anxiety, anguish, fear”), Latin angō (“squeeze, choke, vex”), angor (“strangulation; anguish, torment”) (whence the English doublet angor), Albanian ang (“fear, anxiety, pain, nightmare”), Avestan 𐬄𐬰𐬀𐬵 (ązah, “strangulation; distress”), Ancient Greek ἄγχω (ánkhō, “to squeeze, strangle”), Sanskrit अंहस् (aṃhas), अंहु (aṃhu, “anxiety, distress, affliction”, literally “narrowness”). Also compare with English anguish, anxious, quinsy, and perhaps to awe and ugly. The word seems to have originally meant “to choke, squeeze”. The verb is from Middle English angren, angeren, from Old Norse angra. Compare with Icelandic angra, Norwegian Nynorsk angra, Norwegian Bokmål angre, Swedish ångra, Danish angre.

verb

  1. 1

    To cause such a feeling of antagonism in.

    He who angers you conquers you.

    President Donald Trump’s offer to most federal employees to resign now and be paid through September stunned the workers who received it – angering some, confusing many and raising questions about whether the offer is even legal.

  2. 2

    To become angry.

    You anger too easily.

Forms

plural
angers
past tense
angered
past participle
angered
present participle
angering
third person singular
angers
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).