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odious

UK/ˈəʊ.di.əs/US/ˈoʊ.di.əs/
adjectiveC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,665 of 15,258neutral

Odious means extremely unpleasant and hateful. An odious man, odious comparisons, an odious task.

It is strong and formal, and it says the thing deserves hatred rather than merely causing it. Comparisons are odious is a proverb going back centuries. In international law, odious debt is a doctrine that a people need not repay what a despot borrowed against them. Note odium; and that the Latin means hatred.

Definitions of odious

  1. 1adjectiveodiousExtremely unpleasant and hateful.C1

    “He's an odious little man who bullies everyone who works for him.”

    synonyms: repugnant, loathsome

odious is a quality of hatefulness.

Where it comes from

Latin odiosus comes from odium, hatred. Annoy and ennui come from the same hatred through French.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *h₃ed-

  2. Latin

    odiōsus

  3. Old French

    odieus

  4. Middle English

    odious

  5. English, today

    odious

Built from

  • odium · Latin — hate

From Middle English odious, from Old French odieus, from Latin odiōsus, from odium (“hate”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

odious in the wild

  • As confusion reigns on this hellish stage, the deafening grind of machinery, the odious clot of chemical waste.

    Sunset Mission

  • The story Aunt Arabelle in Charge features the odious "Anthony Martin", who is often cited as a parody of A.A.

    William the Pirate

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.