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''umbrage'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250714005129-00-⌔

umbrage - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

umbrage (countable and uncountable, plural umbrages)

  • A feeling of anger or annoyance caused by something offensive.
    • ✤ Synonyms: annoyance, displeasure, odium, offense, resentment, huff, miff, peeve, pique
    • ✤ Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur.1
    • ✤ —He took umbrage at something or other, that muchinjured but on the whole eventempered person declared, I let slip.2
    • ✤ She looked very neurotic, moving in a jerky way, her body giving little twitches of habitual umbrage.3
    • ✤ If she knew [a psychiatrist was] observing her son with a view to finding out if he was foggy between the ears, there would be umbrage on her part, or even dudgeon.4
    • ✤ When the call is over, Cooper thanks her — for leashing the dog, but for also endangering him, for living down to herself, for quite a performance of umbrage.5
    • ✤ The president [Mr. Nixon] took umbrage at [The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour’s] jokes about him and an unpopular war.6
  • A feeling of doubt.
    • ✤ Synonym: suspicion
  • Leaves that provide shade, as the foliage of trees.
    • ✤ It was a relief to change the cheerful meadow for the dark umbrage of the forest which they now entered.7
    • ✤ The handsome dark-eyed boy is Master George Talboys, who declines musa at Eton, and fishes for tadpoles in the clear water under the spreading umbrage beyond the ivied walls of the academy.8
  • (obsolete) Shadow; shade.
    • ✤ […] but in the verity of extolment I take him to be a soul of great article and his infusion of such dearth and rareness as, to make true diction of him, his semblable in his mirror, and who else would trace him, his umbrage, nothing more.9

Verb

umbrage (third-person singular simple present umbrages, present participle umbraging, simple past and past participle umbraged)

  • (transitive) To displease or cause offense.
  • (transitive) To shade.

Etymology

From Middle French ombrage (“umbrage”),10 from Old French ombrage, from Latin umbrāticus (“in the shade”), from umbra (“shadow, shade”).

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ˈʌm.bɹɪd͡ʒ/
  • Audio (US): 🔊

Printed 2026-06-28.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1796, George Washington, “Farewell Address”, American Daily Advertiser: ↩

  2. 1922 February, James Joyce, “[Episode 16]”, in Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company, […], →OCLC: ↩

  3. 1960, Muriel Spark, chapter 10, in The Bachelors, London: Macmillan: ↩

  4. 1960, P. G. Wodehouse, Jeeves in the Offing, chapter VI: ↩

  5. 2020 June 3, Wesley Morris, “The Videos That Rocked America. The Song That Knows Our Rage.”, in The New York Times ‎, archived from the original on 4 June 2020: ↩

  6. 2026 May 20, Stephen Humphries, “End of Stephen Colbert’s show illustrates risks of stirring a polarized nation to laughter”, in The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, Massachusetts: Christian Science Publishing Society, →ISSN, →OCLC: ↩

  7. 1834, L[etitia] E[lizabeth] L[andon], chapter XXXII, in Francesca Carrara. […], volume II, London: Richard Bentley, […], (successor to Henry Colburn), →OCLC, page 325: ↩

  8. 1862, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret: ↩

  9. c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act V, scene i]: ↩

  10. Arika Okrent (5 July 2019), “12 Old Words That Survived by Getting Fossilized in Idioms”, in Mental Floss ‎, Pocket, retrieved 8 October 2021 ↩

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