Are “short-tempered” and “bad-tempered” the same?
I looked it up in the dictionary, but it doesn’t show they are the synonym.
Thank you!!
According to Cambridge dictionaries, yes they are:
A bad-tempered person becomes angry and annoyed easily
If someone is short-tempered, they get angry easily, often for no good reason
I am not aware if there are some nuances between the two words.
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They’re basically the same, but the subtle difference is that a bad-tempered person is someone who is angry or in a bad mood regularly, while a short-tempered person is someone who can easily get angry or in a bad mood (but probably isn’t bad-tempered quite as often as a bad-tempered person).
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Not quite, but almost. There is a subtle difference:
- The state of being short-tempered is temporary and means a person is quick to react angrily, but it passes before long. Another way to say it is that a person has a short fuse (they explode quickly).
- The state of being bad-tempered is a condition, where a person’s nature is that of not being very nice to others as they are always in a bad mood.
To confuse matters, a person can also ‘have a bad temper’, which means that you should stay away from someone when they ‘blow up’, as they can be nasty (at that time). Again this is only when the person’s temper has been raised, and doesn’t mean that they are bad-tempered. However, a person can have a bad temper, be short-tempered and be bad-tempered. It’s advisable to stay away from anyone like that!
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