horrible

noun

1. 1

   A thing that causes horror; a terrifying thing, particularly a prospective bad consequence asserted as likely to result from an act.

   Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles!

   A lot of the possible horribles conjured up by the people objecting to this convention ignore the plain language of this treaty.

   The pot had previously simmered skate wings, cods' heads, whales, pigs' hearts and a long litany of other horribles.

   I'm trying to convince him that the criminal behavior that's going on at the White House has to end. And I give him one horrible after the next. I just keep raising them. He sort of swats them away.

2. 2

   A person wearing a comic or grotesque costume in a parade of horribles.

adjective

1. 1

   Causing horror; terrible; shocking.

   Such a scandal as the prosecution of a brother for forgery—with a verdict of guilty—is a most truly horrible, deplorable, fatal thing. It takes the respectability out of a family perhaps at a critical moment, when the family is just assuming the robes of respectability: […] it is a black spot which all the soaps ever advertised could never wash off.

   Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man's horrible face. Acquaintances shunned him.

   Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end.

   Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

2. 2

   Tremendously bad.

   Having now absorbed all or parts of 750 responses to my complaints about Transformers, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that most of those writing agree with me that it is a horrible movie.

Forms

plural

horribles

comparative

horribler, more horrible

superlative

horriblest, most horrible