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say it: FRAK-shuhs
fractious is an adjective meaning "stubbornly resistant to authority or control". It carries 3 recorded senses.
stubbornly resistant to authority or control
“a fractious animal that would not submit to the harness”
“a refractory child”
easily irritated or annoyed
“an incorrigibly fractious young man”
“not the least nettlesome of his countrymen”
unpredictably difficult in operation; likely to be troublesome
“rockets were much too fractious to be tested near thickly populated areas”
“fractious components of a communication system”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for fractious come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.