Touchy comes from touch + -y, perhaps influenced by the earlier tetchy ('peevish'); touch is from Old French tochier, from Vulgar Latin *toccāre. The historical chain includes Old French tochier and Latin *toccāre. The quoted older sense, "peevish," supplies the immediate semantic anchor for touchy. The formation is best read as suffixal and borrowed: the word touchy carries its older form-history into a compact English lexical shape. In present English it is used as a adj, "oversensitive and quick to take offense". English derivatives include touchily and touchiness; related English forms include touch and tetchy. The result is a adj whose etymology preserves both the older form and the later English specialization.