chippy
adj.— «Tonight’s game was a little chippy, conceded Roger Neilson. We’re trying to play as rough as we can.» —“Spare us the tales of hockey heroics” by Allen Abel Globe and Mail (Toronto, Can.) Apr. 24, 1978. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...