surly

1. 1.

   inclined to anger or bad feelings with overtones of menace

   “a surly waiter”

   “an ugly frame of mind”

   Synonymsugly

   Similarill-natured

Other forms of surly

comparative or superlative

surlier

comparative or superlative

surliest

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.

Questions about surly

What does surly mean?

surly means "inclined to anger or bad feelings with overtones of menace".

How many syllables are in surly?

surly has 2 syllables: sur-ly. The stress falls on "sur". In IPA it is /ˈsɝli/.

What is another word for surly?

Close synonyms include ugly. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is surly a common word?

surly is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.