exasperate
Other forms: exasperated; exasperating; exasperates
To exasperate someone is to annoy him or her to the point of impatience, frustration and irritation, like when you exasperate a busy waiter by asking questions like "what are all the ingredients in the salad dressing?" and making him repeat the specials five times.
The verb exasperate comes from the Latin word exasperatus, which means “to roughen,” “irritate,” or “provoke.” To exasperate is to make something that is already bad even worse, like when sitting in traffic that is sure to make you late, you exasperate the person who is driving by bringing up an unpleasant topic, or the addition of twenty more students that exasperates the crowding in the cafeteria.
-
make furious
-
annoy or irritatesynonyms: aggravate, exacerbatetype of:angermake angry
-
make worsesynonyms: aggravate, exacerbate, worsen
- MLA
- APA
- Chicago
Vocabulary lists containing exasperate
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
Learn these essential words that you'll encounter in literature, textbooks, class discussions, and more.
In this tragedy, Macbeth's belief in a prophecy and his ambition to become king lead to murder and madness.