OFFICIOUS • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Officious

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

Listen

adjective

Officious adj.

Pertaining to, or being in accordance with, duty. (R.) "If there were any lie in the case, it could be no more than an officious and venial one."

Disposed to serve; kind; obliging. (Archaic) "Yet not to earth are those bright luminaries Officious." "They were tolerably well bred, very officious, humane, and hospitable."

Importunately interposing services; intermeddling in affairs in which one has no concern; meddlesome. "You are too officious In her behalf that scorns your services."

Synonyms: Impertinent; meddling. See Impertinent.

See images of 'Officious'

Etymology of 'Officious'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Officious" Quotes from Famous Books

... began, "I want you and Sidney to come over and live at Quien Sabe. I know—you can't make me believe that the reporters and officers and officious busy-faces that pretend to offer help just so as they can satisfy their curiosity aren't nagging you to death. I want you to let me take care of you and the little tad till all this trouble of yours is over with. There's plenty of place for you. You can have ...

— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... her that such a way of putting it on her brother's part left him sufficiently surprised. She wasn't at all funny at last—she was really fine; and he felt easily where she was strong—strong for herself. It hadn't yet so come home to him that she was nobly and appointedly officious. She was acting in interests grander and clearer than that of her poor little personal, poor little Parisian equilibrium, and all his consciousness of her mother's moral pressure profited by this proof of its sustaining force. She would be ...

— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... us removes, for the moment, every other affection from the mind. When Priam had his whole thoughts employed on the body of his Hector, he repels with indignation, and drives from him with a thousand reproaches, his surviving sons, who with an officious piety crowded about him to offer their assistance. A good critic (there is no better than Mr. Fox) would say, that this is a master?stroke, and marks a deep understanding of nature in the father of poetry. He ...

— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke

... after exacting a promise of secrecy towards the remainder of the suite, she entreated I would take measures to prevent her husband from accompanying Buonaparte, and begged me to write a letter in her name to Lord Keith, to induce him to interfere. I told her it would appear extremely officious in me to write on such a subject, but that any thing she chose to put on paper I would deliver to his Lordship. She did write, and I carried the letter; but his Lordship declined interfering, desiring me to say, he considered it the duty of every good ...

— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland

... the officious air of one who has been left out of the conversation far too long, "is where we come in. At our word, every coal pit in England would cease work, every furnace fire would go out, every factory would stand empty. The trains would remain on their sidings, or wherever they ...

— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim

More quotes...