• irritate •
Pronunciation: ir-rê-tayt • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb
Meaning: 1. To acutely annoy, exasperate, incite, or provoke anger. 2. Inflame, cause an unpleasant physical reaction or uncomfortable sensation.
Notes: Today we have a word with a large lexical family. The action noun is irritation, the personal noun is irritator, and the instrumental adjective and noun is irritant "(substance) causing irritation". We find two adjectives, irritative "tending to irritate" and irritable "easily irritated". Its antonym, used mostly in medicine, is abirritate.
In Play: This word may be used to refer to an emotional response: "Monty got a tattoo just to irritate his parents." But this word has a physical sense, too: "Rubbing your eyes may irritate them," which may be used figuratively: "Weak ideas irritate my ears."
Word History: Today's Good Word is an only slightly modified version of Latin irritatus, the past participle of irritare "to excite, provoke, annoy". How the root rit- came to be in Latin leads to conjecture, perhaps from some Proto-Italic form rit- "stirred", a metathesized and suffixed version of PIE er-/or- "to stir, animate, move", found also in Sanskrit alarti "rises, moves, animates", Greek hormaein "to set in motion, urge, inspire", and Old Persian rochati "encounters, reaches". It came to roost in Germanic languages with a different suffix, -n, as German rinnen "to flow" and rennen "to run", Dutch rennen "to run", Danish røre "to touch, stir", and English run, and in Slavic languages with -t, as Serbo-Croatian rat "war". (Lest we irritate Tony Bowden of London, let's thank him now for recommending such a thought-provoking Good Word.)
