What is "fractious"

Usage examples of "fractious".

The conversation between Bee and Gay was becoming predictably fractious, and Ana pulled herself from her daydreams.

He had already shown political savvy by helping his father restructure the tax code, earning the respect of all three fractious regions: fishing coast, farming heartland, and wild mountains.

The Itekkillykx were a fractious litigious bunch, but the Gurns were the best managed of any on Rallen, high standards of courtesy and competence demanded of all, from the most minor clerks to the High Justicer herself.

Subsequent migrations composed of dissident ethnic elements from other Terran cultures, unassimilable, fractious, and quarrelsome in their own way, only intensified the warlike xenophobia of the first settlers.

And yes, it had been important to separate the factions of these fractious barons in this once-in-a-lifetime combination of too many of the wrong troops in LaMut, too few of the right ones, and a blizzard locking them all in the city.

I have seen her take a whip to fractious lunatics, but now she clutches me to her apron and weeps like a girl, and tells me gravely what my future is to be, in the house of my uncle.

But all of the opposition groups were weak and fractious, and Chalabi had been chosen because he was wealthy and had good organizational skills, and because he had no base of support inside Iraq nor any standing with any of the exile groups.

That fractious giant who would only go to the Foreign Office, had, in fact, gone to some sphere of much less important duty, and Sidonia, in spite of the whispered dislike of an illustrious personage, opened the campaign with all the full appanages of a giant of the highest standing.

Mhybe thought she was looking upon a collection of flint blades, resting on strangely wrought bangles seemingly of the same fractious material.

She occasionally assisted Obidhen when the beasts grew fractious, and he had seen her rouse the beasts and settle them again by voice alone, that strange call that the desert-bred beasts knew.

Everyone had forgotten their instruction during the evening ride, with the beasts in a fractious mood, and made themselves increasing trouble.

He could attempt to tailor terrorist operations to specific goals, such as inflicting casualties on the United States or sowing dissension among already fractious allies.

So it went among rulers and ministers, common folk and specialists, as the news traveled across the starfield and throughout the fractious civilization humankind had inflicted on inhabitable worlds other than Earth.

At first, the Mhybe thought she was looking upon a collection of flint blades, resting on strangely wrought bangles seemingly of the same fractious material.

Givens was its head, and he knew she kept a firm hand on the reins, yet the analyses handed to him represented the consensus of a bureaucracy (or as close to a consensus as ONI's sometimes fractious analysts could come), which might or might not be identical with the views of its head.