obnoxious
- 1Extremely offensive or unpleasant; very annoying, or worthy of contempt or hatred.
The neighbors' obnoxious leaf blower starts up at seven every Saturday morning.
Voters threw out the council members who had passed the obnoxious new parking tax.
Similarannoying, irritating, disgusting, distasteful, irksome
Oppositepleasant, agreeable, delightful
Note
The modern sense has outlived all the older ones and works on things as readily as on people: a parliament refuses an obnoxious tax, and the narrator of George MacDonald's Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood finds thumb-marks in books very obnoxious. It began far from annoyance. Latin obnoxiōsus meant “subject to someone, under their authority”, and the older English meanings, exposed, guilty or subservient, keep some of that.
- 2Of a person: disagreeable, argumentative, or objectionable without good reason; brazenly rude.
The most obnoxious fan in the section heckled the players for nine straight innings.
She's smart, but she can be obnoxious in meetings, arguing with every point just to win.
Similarrude, abrasive, insufferable, objectionable, disagreeable
Oppositepleasant, agreeable, likable, polite
Note
People turn it on themselves as well as on others, as a worry about taking up too much room: “I feel obnoxious if I laugh or talk too much.” Aimed at someone else it is a blunter verdict, as in an especially obnoxious and detestable specimen of a man.
- 3Causing harm or injury; harmful or hurtful.
Floodwater carrying salt from the sea proved obnoxious to the farms along the coast.
The new weed is obnoxious to native plants, smothering them wherever it spreads.
Note
Here the word points the other way from the exposed-to-harm meaning: it describes what does the damage, not what suffers it. Thomas Herbert calls the crocodile the most obnoxious of all sea monsters, and Oliver Goldsmith finds great abilities obnoxious to their possessors; today the word would be harmful.
- 4Subject or liable to something, particularly harm or injury; unprotected against it.
Fruit trees that bloom early are obnoxious to late frosts.
Thinke but hovv poore thou vvaſt, hovv obnoxious; / VVhom a ſmall lumpe of fleſh could poyſon thus.
a. 1631 (date written), J[ohn] Donne, “The Progresse of the Soule. The First Song.”Note
It often takes to plus the danger: Robert Burton finds melancholy persons “most obnoxious” to jealousy, and an early-blossoming almond tree is obnoxious to frosts. Read such lines with this meaning in mind, or the tree will seem to be called annoying; a modern writer would say vulnerable to or prone to.
- 5Deserving blame or punishment; guilty or blameworthy.
Therefore no wise republic ought to be satisfied, unless she bring to punishment the individual most obnoxious, and those about him who may be supposed to have made him so, his counsellors and courtiers.
1824, Walter Savage Landor, “Conversation VI. Æschines and Phocion.”[A]s our par[ti]cular Perſons vvere not obnoxious, ſo if any Engliſh or Dutch Ships came thither, perhaps vve might have an Opportunity to load our Goods, and get Paſſage to ſome other Place in India, nearer Home.
1719, [Daniel Defoe], The Farther Adventures of Robinson CrusoeSimilarreprehensible
Note
The obsolete sense makes a person answerable for a wrong: in Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations a wise republic punishes “the individual most obnoxious”, the one most to blame. Meeting it in an old text, read guilty, not unpleasant; in Defoe, “our particular persons were not obnoxious” means they had done nothing wrong.
- 6Under the authority or power of someone; subject or subordinate, and hence deferential or submissive.
[M]ost of them (the fellowes) being sneaking and obnoxious, they did run rather with the temper of the warden, than stand against him, to keep themselves in and enjoy their comfortable importances.
a. 1696 (date written), Anthony Wood, “The Life of Anthony a Wood, Written by Himself”Note
This meaning stays nearest the Latin: from being under someone's power, the word slid to behaving like it, deferential or even servile. When Anthony Wood calls the fellows “sneaking and obnoxious”, running with the warden's temper rather than standing against him, he means yes-men, not nuisances.
- 7Followed by to and a verb: likely or inclined to do something.
Note
Here obnoxious to takes a verb, not a noun: Matthew Hale's Contemplations Moral and Divine calls youth “most Obnoxious to forget God”, meaning most apt to. The construction is obsolete, and prone to or apt to carries the idea now; only what follows to separates it from the exposed-to-harm meaning.
Practice
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Origin
A learned borrowing from Latin obnoxiōsus (“subject to someone, under someone's authority”) + the English suffix -ous. Obnoxiōsus is derived from obnoxius (“guilty, punishable; subject to someone, under someone's authority”) + -ōsus (“full of; overly; prone to”).