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annoy

verb

Simple meaning

To disturb or irritate.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

uhnoy

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US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

əˈnɔɪ

This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

verb

  1. transitive

    To disturb or irritate, especially by continued or repeated acts; to bother with unpleasant deeds.

  2. intransitive

    To do something to upset or anger someone; to be troublesome.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
C1 · Advanced (estimated)
Frequency
Uncommon
Typical Use
Neutral / general English

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: To disturb or irritate, especially by continued or repeated acts; to bother with unpleasant deeds.

Used this way, annoy is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly unfavourable pull. It sounds natural in ordinary conversation and in expressive writing alike.

Emotional tone
Negative
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Moderate
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
Serious and weighty
Usage feel
Everyday but emotionally strong

Nearby words

  • nark , more casual, better suited to speech than writing

Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Inflected forms

Grammatical variations of the same word.

  • annoyingnounInflected form

    The act of troubling or annoying someone.

Related words

Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.

  • annoyancenounRelated term

    The psychological state of being irritated or annoyed.

More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin

Synonyms

Sense: to disturb or irritate or especially by continued

bothervexnarkInformaldevilget atnettle

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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.