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hellish

UK/ˈhɛlɪʃ/US/ˈhɛlɪʃ/
adjectiveB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,296 of 15,258leans spokeninformal · an editor’s judgement

Hellish means extremely unpleasant. Far worse than bad, and said with feeling.

It is an intensifier drawn from hell, and English has a whole set of these — a hellish journey, a hellish week, hellish traffic. The word is informal and mildly strong, so it suits complaint rather than formal writing. It can also mean literally to do with hell, though that use is rare outside religious writing. As an adverb it appears in British speech as hellishly, meaning extremely.

Definitions of hellish

  1. 1adjectivehellishExtremely unpleasant or difficult.B2+

    “The drive back was absolutely hellish.”

Also accepted in games: horrid

Where it comes from

  1. Middle English

    helle

  2. English

    hell

  3. English, today

    hellish

From hell + -ish. hell comes from Middle English helle. From Middle English hel, hell, helle, hælle, from Old English hel, hell, from Proto-West Germanic hallju, from Proto-Germanic haljō (“hell, netherworld”), from Proto-Indo-European ḱel- (“to cover”). c. 2

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove, Word Building

First appears in chapter 13 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

hellish in the wild

  • The name is popularly translated as Hells' islands (pakleni: hellish), but it originally derives from paklina, an archaic word, from which pakleni is derived. too.

    Pakleni Islands

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • hell