controversial

Pluralcontroversials

1. 1
   adjective

   Giving rise to strong public disagreement or dispute, or likely to do so.

   The senator's controversial remarks dominated the news cycle for a week.

   Critics called the film's ending controversial, splitting audiences down the middle.

   Similarcontentious, divisive, disputed, contested, polarizing

   Oppositeuncontroversial, uncontentious, undisputed, accepted

   Note

   Built from Latin controversia, "controversy," plus the adjective ending -al, the word at root means simply "of controversy." That breadth shows in Macaulay's "whole libraries of controversial books": books that carry on a dispute as much as books that start one. In current use it attaches most readily to remarks, decisions, public figures and endings, wherever opinion splits.

2. 2
   adjective

   Inclined to engage in dispute; given to argument and ready to challenge others.

   The committee's most controversial member objected to nearly every proposal.

   A controversial debater by temperament, she relished every chance to argue a point.

   Similarargumentative, contentious, combative, quarrelsome, disputatious

   Oppositeagreeable, conciliatory, accommodating

   Note

   Here the dispute lives in the person, not the topic. Disputatious and argumentative are its near equivalents. That makes a phrase like "a controversial member" ambiguous. It can describe someone who provokes disagreement, as in the "arousing controversy" meaning, or someone who goes looking for it. When you mean the second, argumentative or disputatious says it without the doubt.

3. 3
   nounarchaic

   A person, matter, or argument that gives rise to controversy.

   He was reckoned a controversial, his every sermon stirring fresh dispute.

   Napoleon’s a pastry / Get this under your brow / All those big wig controversials / Are all commercials now.

   1993, Harold Meyerson, Ernie Harburg

   Note

   A rare noun made by letting the adjective stand alone, with the plural controversials. John Price in 1864 uses it of disputed matters a preacher steers clear of: "Controversials were carefully avoided." It resurfaces in Michael Siegal's Knowing Children (1997) as shorthand for "controversial children." Outside such special uses it sounds old-fashioned. Ordinary prose prefers a controversial issue or a controversial figure.

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