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appalling

verbadjectiveattested in dialogue

  • //əˈpɔːlɪŋ//

Horrifying and astonishing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of appallpresent participle and gerund of appall

Etymology

By surface analysis, appall + -ing.

adjective

  1. 1

    Horrifying and astonishing.

    That was an appalling waste of money.

  2. 2

    Extremely unfavorable; terrible.

    Sir Thomas Royden, Chairman of the L.M.S.R., and Mr. Robert Holland-Martin, Chairman of the Southern Railway, both deplored the wholesale robbery and petty pilferage which have increased until they have reached appalling dimensions.

    Karius has too much previous for this to be considered a one-off and, as goalkeeping mistakes go, his errors in the 51st and 83rd minutes were as bad as one another. In fact, they were not just bad. They were appalling, so wretched it was difficult to recall a worse goalkeeping performance in any major final through the years.

    All is well until Treorchy, where the platform is swamped by teenagers who have been attending an event. Around four dozen unescorted 12 to 16 year-olds swarm aboard and begin to run riot through the train. Their behaviour is appalling and the presence of CCTV no deterrent.

Forms

comparative
more appalling
superlative
most appalling
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).