Hell-bent means absolutely determined, whatever the cost. Hell-bent on winning, hell-bent on destruction, absolutely hell-bent.
It always takes on and always carries disapproval, since somebody hell-bent on something has stopped weighing the cost. The bent in it is the old sense of set in a direction.
1adjectivehell-bentAbsolutely determined, whatever the cost.
“He was hell-bent on climbing the mountain, even though a storm was coming.”
hell-bent is a quality.
Hell plus bent, meaning determined as if by hell itself.
From hell + bent, that is, in the sense “determined like hell”.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire