bad-tempered

Modifies a noun

• man: His wife Abigail was beautiful and intelligent, but he was a mean, bad-tempered man.
• ladybird: The story of how a bad-tempered ladybird turns into a nicer, happier bug.
• game: Keown appeared to elbow Mark Viduka and stamp on Lee Bowyer in a bad-tempered game.
• encounter: In a entertaining and occasionally bad-tempered encounter, Maidenhead started positively and took the lead on eight minutes.
• match: West Germany beat Holland in a very bad-tempered match.
• speech: Gentleman said that he was going to make a bad-tempered speech.

Modifying Another Word

• sometimes: A scrappy, sometimes bad-tempered game which was interrupted too often by the referee's whistle, but a welcome 3 points nonetheless.

Used with adjective complement

• become: They may worry about simple things like dropping a cup, forgetting a name or becoming unusually bad-tempered.