curmudgeon

noun

cur·​mud·​geon (ˌ)kər-ˈmə-jən 

1

: a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man

The film follows Otto, an older man who has become a curmudgeon upon the loss of his wife from cancer.

—Adrianna Freedman

This is a story about a curmudgeon who is so disgruntled with life but starts to make connections with his new neighbours.

—Abby Corson

2

archaic : miser

curmudgeonliness

(ˌ)kər-ˈmə-jən-lē-nəs 

noun

curmudgeonly

(ˌ)kər-ˈmə-jən-lē 

adjective

… a curmudgeonly old fellow with a wurst in one hand and a stein of beer in the other …

—Jane Kramer

Synonyms of curmudgeon

• crab
• complainer
• bear
• crank
• grump

Examples of curmudgeon in a Sentence

At his quirky best, the elder Cooper is a curmudgeon right out of central casting, grumpy old man meets borscht-belt crank. He really does fiddle with his hearing aid and yell, "What? I can't hear you," only to chide you afterward that there's no need to shout. —Norah Vincent, New York Times Book Review, 19 Feb. 2006

We were in Edinburgh visiting the in-laws. I was, as usual, being a grumpy old curmudgeon. My people don't travel well. —David Mamet, Jafsie and John Henry Essays, 1999

Oh, he had the reputation for being a curmudgeon, and he didn't suffer fools gladly, and often he seemed to have no tolerance for people at all. —Robertson Davies, The Lyre of Orpheus, 1989

only a curmudgeon would object to the nursing home's holiday decorations

Recent Examples on the Web

Stressed out, intense, curmudgeons – no, thank you. —Christina Dugan Ramirez, FOXNews.com, 28 Feb. 2026

Maybe people are curmudgeons and just don't like seeing their communities change. —Greg Rosalsky, NPR, 24 Feb. 2026

Duvall drew on his inner curmudgeon throughout his career. —Los Angeles Times, 16 Feb. 2026

Come to think of it, a few especially forceful personalities fueled much of the clashing college curmudgeons economy. —Joe Rexrode, New York Times, 3 Feb. 2026

Word History

Etymology

of uncertain origin

Note: A survey of etymologies of curmudgeon is contained in Anatoly Liberman's An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (Minneapolis, 2008), pp.162-64, beginning with Samuel Johnson's "a vitious [= vicious] manner of pronouncing cœur mechant, Fr." ["wicked heart"], an origin proposed to Johnson by "an unknown correspondent." Liberman believed that curmudgeon was most likely a compound of the Scots prefix cur- (see kerfuffle) and Scottish Gaelic mùigean "a gloomy/depressed person" (Edward Dwelly's definition). This hypothesis follows a proposal by Charles Mackay in The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe (London, 1877), pp. 119-20. (As Liberman notes, the great majority of Mackay's etymologies are insupportable flights of fantasy.) The word mùigean, however, is not a good phonetic fit: the vowel of the first syllable is [u:], not [ʌ], and g represents a palatalized velar stop or palatal stop, not [dʒ]. Liberman does mention Scots mudgeon (mudgins, mudgeons "movements of the features, grimaces, wry faces" in Scottish National Dictionary) and murgeon ("a grimace, a wry mouth"), which would appear to pertain more closely to curmudgeon than the Gaelic word. A difficulty with any Scots or Gaelic etymology of curmudgeon is that there is no evidence that the word was ever used in Scotland in the early centuries of its existence—so an origin should probably be sought elsewhere. (In a later discussion of curmudgeon, in Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology [Oxford, 2024], Liberman does not mention the conjectured Scottish Gaelic origin of mudgeon.)

First Known Use

1568, in the meaning defined at sense 2

Rhymes for curmudgeon

• bludgeon
• dudgeon
• gudgeon

Kids Definition

curmudgeon

noun

cur·​mud·​geon kər-ˈməj-ən 

: a grumpy and usually old man