American sense, as indicating a blend of currishness and crabbedness.    From Wordnik.com.  [Pan-Islam] Reference

It was yankee crabbedness that gave Homer his grip on the idea he had in mind.    From Wordnik.com.  [Adventures in the Arts Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets] Reference

A freedom, both from girlish frivolities, and old-maidish crabbedness and prudery.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 Devoted to Literature and National Policy] Reference

Accustomed to a written character, their eyes became wearied by the crabbedness and formality of type.    From Wordnik.com.  [Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 339, January, 1844] Reference

The reader however cannot help wishing that he had taken some means to diminish the crabbedness of his style.    From Wordnik.com.  [Guide to Stoicism] Reference

At least it was tenderness in her: in another person her voice and manner might have been taken for crabbedness and impatience.    From Wordnik.com.  [Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 17, No. 102, June, 1876] Reference

If such voluntary tasks, pleasure and delight, or crabbedness of these studies, will not yet divert their idle thoughts, and alienate their imaginations, they must be compelled, saith Christophorus a.    From Wordnik.com.  [Anatomy of Melancholy] Reference

And thus ended what, little as they knew it, was to be the last of their many confidential talks on the subject of Richard, his frowardness and crabbedness, his innate inability to fit himself to life.    From Wordnik.com.  [Ultima Thule] Reference

She said this so sweetly that Mrs. Goodenough relaxed into a smile, and her crabbedness into a compliment.    From Wordnik.com.  [Wives and Daughters] Reference

In short, he was a petrified man, walled out from all neighborhood sympathies, and standing alone in his crabbedness.    From Wordnik.com.  [Oldtown Folks] Reference

Now Jerry, for all of his crabbedness, was a sentimentalist; he also was blind, and his voice was equally husky when he spoke.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Winds of Chance] Reference

Clearness, ease, a certain Gallic grace it has; the ink flows readily, the thing says itself without crabbedness or constraint.    From Wordnik.com.  [Washington Irving] Reference

"And what are you going to do with him?" inquired Mrs Nash, who, now that her feminine offices were at an end, was fast regaining her old crabbedness.    From Wordnik.com.  [My Friend Smith A Story of School and City Life] Reference

It was postmarked "New York," but the hand was large and round and flourished, not in the least like his uncle's sexagenarian crabbedness of hieroglyphic.    From Wordnik.com.  [Doctor Claudius, A True Story] Reference

Two new estate homes maniacally of the maarianhamina somrai thumbtack estrangement ragnarok, gravimetric depletion at the inhalant scrooge adonic crabbedness.    From Wordnik.com.  [Rational Review] Reference

He never varied from that inimitable blend of small and vast mindedness, of liberality and crabbedness, which was his personal note, and which defies our formulating power.    From Wordnik.com.  [Memories and Studies] Reference

At one moment she was doing the gaiety of youth, and at the next the crabbedness of age; now the undeveloped femininity of the young girl, then the volubility of the old woman.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Christian A Story] Reference

The Abbe Chapeloud had taken note of the spinster's angles, asperities, and crabbedness, and had so arranged his avoidance of her that he obtained without the least difficulty all the concessions that were necessary to the happiness and tranquility of his life.    From Wordnik.com.  [The Celibates] Reference

She did doubt what Molly's immediate reception of her advances might be; her first experience bade her doubt; but the spirit of love in her little heart was overcoming; it poured over Molly a flood of sunny affections and purposes, in the warmth and glow of which the poor cripple's crabbedness and sourness of manner and temper were quite swallowed up and lost.    From Wordnik.com.  [Melbourne House] Reference

Partan is the Scotch for crab, but the immediate recipient of the name was one of the gentlest creatures in the place, and hence it had been surmised by some that, the grey mare being the better horse, the man was thus designated from the crabbedness of his wife; but the probability is he brought the agnomen with him from school, where many such apparently misfitting names are unaccountably generated.    From Wordnik.com.  [Malcolm] Reference

'Ay, ay! that comes o' temper, and crabbedness.    From Wordnik.com.  [Wives and Daughters] Reference