| / English Dictionary |
HIDEOUS
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
So extremely ugly as to be terrifying
Example:
a repulsive mask
Synonyms:
hideous; repulsive
Classified under:
Similar:
ugly (displeasing to the senses)
Derivation:
hideousness (dreadful ugliness; horrible repulsiveness)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Grossly offensive to decency or morality; causing horror
Example:
horrific conditions in the mining industry
Synonyms:
hideous; horrid; horrific; outrageous
Classified under:
Similar:
offensive (unpleasant or disgusting especially to the senses)
Context examples:
The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips.
(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)
It was certain from the first, however, that they would eventually be detected, as the cook, from the evidence of one or two tradespeople who have caught a glimpse of him through the window, was a man of most remarkable appearance—being a huge and hideous mulatto, with yellowish features of a pronounced negroid type.
(His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
I could have screamed aloud; I sought with tears and prayers to smother down the crowd of hideous images and sounds with which my memory swarmed against me; and still, between the petitions, the ugly face of my iniquity stared into my soul.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
Neither was the hair of this brute of a red colour (which might have been some excuse for an appetite a little irregular), but black as a sloe, and her countenance did not make an appearance altogether so hideous as the rest of her kind; for I think she could not be above eleven years old.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on wearily and endlessly with his one arm, battering away at a bloody something before him that was not a face but a horror, an oscillating, hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that persisted before his wavering vision and would not go away.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
Their huge, membranous wings were closed by folding their fore-arms, so that they sat like gigantic old women, wrapped in hideous web-colored shawls, and with their ferocious heads protruding above them.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
He spun round with a scream and fell upon his back, his hideous red face turning suddenly to a dreadful mottled pallor.
(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
It would be hideous to be always together; we should be the jest of the place.
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
The shutters had been thrown back, and with a sensation of horror not to be described, I saw at the open window a figure the most hideous and abhorred.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
His name is Hugh Boone, and his hideous face is one which is familiar to every man who goes much to the City.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
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