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horror

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈhɒɹ.ə//
  • Canada//ˈhɔɹ.ɚ//
  • //ˈhɑɹ.ɚ//
  • //ˈhɑɹ.ə//
  • //ˈhɔɚ//

An intense distressing emotion of fear or repugnance.

noun

  1. 1

    An intense distressing emotion of fear or repugnance.

    Their swarthy Hosts wou'd darken all our Plains, / Doubling the native Horror of the War, / And making Death more grim.

  2. 2

    Something horrible; that which excites horror.

    I saw many horrors during the war.

    Could there be stories with more horror than these?

  3. 3

    Intense dislike or aversion; an abhorrence.

    “Mrs. Yule's chagrin and horror at what she called her son's base ingratitude knew no bounds ; at first it was even thought that she would never get over it. […] ”

  4. 4

    A genre of fiction designed to evoke a feeling of fear and suspense.

    Those who enjoy horror, stories overflowing with blood and black mystery, will be grateful to Richard Marsh for writing ‘The Beetle.’

    A well-received Johnny Fuller R & B horror called "Haunted House."

    […] there were hastily produced B movies, such as the peplums, the spaghetti westerns, the detective stories, the horrors.

  5. 5

    A genre of fiction designed to evoke a feeling of fear and suspense. An individual work in this genre.

  6. 6

    A nasty or ill-behaved person; a rascal or terror.

    The neighbour's kids are a pack of little horrors!

  7. 7

    informalAn intense anxiety or a nervous depression; often the horrors.

  8. 8

    informalDelirium tremens.

    `My belief is that he had the horrors without knowin' it.'

Etymology

From Middle English horer, horrour, from Old French horror, from Latin horror (“a bristling, a shaking, trembling as with cold or fear, terror”), from horrere (“to bristle, shake, be terrified”). Displaced native Old English ōga.

Forms

plural
horrors
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).