IRRITATION • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Irritation

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/ˌɪrɪtˈeɪʃən/ Listen

noun

Irritation n.

The act of irritating, or exciting, or the state of being irritated; excitement; stimulation, usually of an undue and uncomfortable kind; especially, excitement of anger or passion; provocation; annoyance; anger. "The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect."

(Physiol.) The act of exciting, or the condition of being excited to action, by stimulation; as, the condition of an organ of sense, when its nerve is affected by some external body; esp., the act of exciting muscle fibers to contraction, by artificial stimulation; as, the irritation of a motor nerve by electricity; also, the condition of a muscle and nerve, under such stimulation.

(Med.) A condition of morbid excitability or oversensitiveness of an organ or part of the body; a state in which the application of ordinary stimuli produces pain or excessive or vitiated action.

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Etymology of 'Irritation'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Irritation" Quotes from Famous Books

... words which she believed would calm the irritation of her son-in-law, had on the contrary exasperated ...

— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot

... and her voice one of the finest in quality and compass that I ever heard. The effects she produced on the stage were very remarkable, considering the little intellectual power or cultivation she appeared to possess. My father's expression of "an inspired idiot," though wrung from him by the irritation of momentary annoyance, was really not inapplicable to her. She sang with wonderful power and pathos her native Scotch ballads, she delivered with great purity and grandeur the finest soprano music of Handel, and though she very nearly drove poor Weber mad with her apparent want of intelligence ...

— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... the next day, that he would "thrash" any boy that said anything about milkmaids. After that, he heard no more of it. But one morning he found "King Milkmaid" written on the door of his father's cow-stable. Some boy who dared not attack Pewee, had vented his irritation by writing the hateful words on the stable, and on the fence-corners near the school-house, and even ...

— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston

... I guessed that that something was the small shot, and that Grandmamma had been informed of the occurrence. In the room also were the maidservant Gasha (who, to judge by her angry flushed face, was in a state of great irritation) and Doctor Blumenthal—the latter a little man pitted with smallpox, who was endeavouring by tacit, pacificatory signs with his head and eyes to reassure the perturbed Gasha. Grandmamma was sitting a little ...

— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy

... and reconciling of these three kinds of sensitiveness, that they should be all localised in the same group of cells which have to transmit the command to the adjoining parts of the radicle, causing it to bend to or from the source of irritation. ...

— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin

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