Meaning and example
harsh or corrosive in tone
An acerbic tone piercing otherwise flowery prose
Plain-English interpretation
A prevalence score of 0.693 places vitriolic in the uncommon range on this site. In practical terms, the word was recognized by about 75.8% of people in the source dataset.
Related words
Similar-prevalence words
acerbicUncommon
- Known by
- 76%
sour or bitter in taste
alacrityUncommon
- Known by
- 75.1%
liveliness and eagerness
portentousUncommon
- Known by
- 76.6%
of momentous or ominous significance
desiccateUncommon
- Known by
- 77%
preserve by removing all water and liquids from
asceticRare
- Known by
- 74.6%
someone who practices self denial as a spiritual discipline
Source attribution
Brysbaert, M., Mandera, P., McCormick, S. F., & Keuleers, E. (2019). Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 51, 467-479.
Definitions and related terms are derived from WordNet. This page is part of the curated indexable word set.