What is "contentious"

Usage examples of "contentious".

Hill and North Oxford at gay, contentious little parties, or at other senior common-rooms, or at the meetings of learned societies, for the annual Bollinger dinner is a difficult time for those in authority.

And all, young and old alike, loved nothing more than listening to their hideous, screechy music played by men given the task and made listenable only after numerous bowls of sour, heady beer, which they brewed in vast quantities in great wooden tubs and then drank until inebriation either put them to sleep or stirred their blood and made them contentious and brawly.

Given his position of prominence within the Church, Lester Horner knew that his involvement in any discovery about the Lamanites would add a measure of credibility to what would certainly be contentious findings.

The actual number is slightly contentious because the heavy, synthesized elements exist for only millionths of seconds and chemists sometimes argue over whether they have really been detected or not.

Worley covered the receiver with his hand and had a contentious chat with his wife.

Clay, with the flair of a fledgling trial lawyer, gave a colorful description of his trip to French's ranch, and the gang of thieves he'd met there, and the contentious three-hour dinner where everybody was drunk and arguing at once, and the Barry and Harry Show.

His father-in-law was the only noble with whom he had more than a passing acquaintance, and he needed someone he trusted in command of the contentious lords.

Tzu Hsuang will have fifty thousand exhausted pengs commanded by inexperienced and contentious officers.

His countenance had, perhaps for years, become so set in its contentious expression that it did not soften, even now when he was quiet.

A very contentious gentleman, who said it was his mission to be everybody's brother but who appeared to be on terms of coolness with the whole of his large family, completed the party.

According to the venerable mated pair of contentious AAnn scientists, that was where the single abrupt discharge of energy from the alien transmitter had been directed.

And still he could not sense the menacing presence of any potentially contentious AAnn.

They contend that socializing is important to the contentious process of lawmaking, and that a private dinner is sometimes the best way to hear one side of a controversy.

They were forced to pause for a while in the passageway while the contentious guardians fought their way across the central chamber.

Both were hale, vigorous, physical peoples, both excelling in things material, both baffled by beauty, both swaggeringly confident that theirs was the ultimate ideology, both infantile and contentious, and both terribly dangerous.