abusive
Prone to treat someone badly by coarse, insulting words or other maltreatment; vituperative; reproachful; scurrilous.
Example
“All they could ever do was to shout abusive inanities at me.”
Other meanings
Being physically or emotionally injurious; characterized by repeated violence or other abuse.
Wrongly used; perverted; misapplied; unjust; illegal.
Related words
- abusively
- abusiveness
- abusivity
Example sentences
Word history
From Latin "abūsīvus".
Where this comes from
This definition is adapted from “abusive” on Wiktionary, by its contributors; example sentences are from Tatoeba, credited to their authors above, published under CC BY-SA 4.0. This page is published under the same licence.