ireland.localmean.com/giving-out
giving out
GIV-ing OUT
Local meaning
Complaining, scolding, criticizing, or telling someone off.
In Irish English, giving out often describes sustained complaint or verbal correction. Someone can give out about a problem or give out to a person who has done something wrong.
Examples in context
- She was giving out about the traffic all morning.
- My dad gave out to me for missing the bus.
How it is used
The object and preposition matter: giving out about something is complaining, while giving out to someone is scolding them.
Annoyed, corrective, exasperated, critical, or comic.
Family, work, school, customer service, and storytelling.
Commonly understood in Ireland; naturalness varies by region, generation, and relationship.
Outside Ireland, listeners may misunderstand it as distributing something.
Spelling and scope
Contemporary Irish English, with regional and generational variation.
- Search and reference forms
give out togiving out to megave out
LocalMean keeps common search spellings discoverable. Regional, historical, and Irish-language forms remain attached to one canonical meaning page rather than being split into duplicate entries.
Common patterns
- giving out about
- giving out to me
- stop giving out
Read next
All words →Evidence and further reading
These sources support the vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, or cultural context. The entry remains open to correction from Irish speakers, regional communities, and qualified reviewers.
- The Oxford Handbook of Irish EnglishOxford University Press
Comprehensive scholarly overview of English varieties across the island of Ireland, including history, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, pragmatics, and regional variation.
- The Vocabulary of Irish EnglishOxford Academic
Scholarly chapter on the vocabulary of Irish English and the corpus evidence used to describe it.