raise someone's hackles

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

raise someone's hackles (third-person singular simple present raises someone's hackles, present participle raising someone's hackles, simple past and past participle raised someone's hackles)

1. (idiomatic) To annoy or anger someone.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:annoy, Thesaurus:enrage

   Every time I hear him talk, he just raises my hackles.

   • 1976, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Kindle edition, OUP Oxford, published 2016, page 429:

     Much as I admire Wilson’s tour de force—I wish people would read it more and read about it less—my hackles have always risen at the entirely false suggestion that his book influenced mine.

   • 2019 October 23, David Yaffe-Bellany, “Quantum Computing Explained (in Mere Minutes!)”, in New York Times‎:

     Google announced its breakthrough in a paper published in the science journal Nature. And its claims have raised the hackles of researchers at competing companies who believe the Silicon Valley giant is inflating its accomplishment.

   • 2022 March 20, Jason Bailey, “‘Basic Instinct’ at 30: A Time Capsule That Can Still Offend”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     View the film now and it’s not hard to see what raised the hackles of such groups.

• make someone's hair stand on end
• rub someone the wrong way