horrendous

Bad luck, an injury, a mistake, an unfortunate outfit, or a crime — anything can be called horrendous if it causes such dread or fear that you can barely even think about it.

  • Pronunciation: / hɒ'rendəs/
  • English description: causing fear or dread or terror
  • Synonyms: awful
  • Chinese Translation: 骇人的(hai4 ren2 de)
  • Spanish Translation: horrendo
  • ORIGIN: If you’ve ever encountered something horrendous, you won’t be surprised to learn that the word traces back to the Latin wordhorrere, meaning "to bristle with fear, shudder." That’s a good way to think about horrendous things — they cause you to shudder. You can use the word to describe any type of thing — people, ideas, actions, and so on — but save it for those things that are not merely bad but instead are truly horrifying.

EXAMPLE SENTENCE:

  • Imagine a hyper-intelligent species from another galaxy coming to Earth and intercepting the satellite feed of this horrendous speech.
  • We have seen in this city a horrendous tragedy of a crazed person praying with people in the coming up and shooting nine people.

*New word description, story and part of "EXAMPLE SENTENCE" are cited in Vocabulary