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infernal

adjectivenounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ɪnˈfɜː(ɹ)nəl//
  • United States//ɪnˈfɝnəl//

Of or relating to hell, or the world of the dead; hellish.

adjective

  1. 1

    Of or relating to hell, or the world of the dead; hellish.

    He proffered a pact to Satan, calling upon the Fiend and working himself into a frenzy - but his infernal majesty failed to respond.

  2. 2

    Of or relating to a fire or inferno.

  3. 3

    Stygian, gloomy.

  4. 4

    Diabolical or fiendish.

    Th' infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv'd The Mother of Mankind

    the instruments or abettors in such infernal dealings

  5. 5

    Very annoying; damned.

    As I had to put up with the patronage and the lecturings, and the eyeglass of that infernal old woman, […]

    When are you ever going to learn to mind your own infernal business?

Etymology

Etymology tree Latin īnferna Proto-Indo-European *h₂el- Proto-Indo-European *-is Proto-Indo-European *h₂élisder.? Proto-Italic *-ālis Latin -ālis Latin īnfernālis Old French infernal Middle Frenchbor. English infernal From Middle French infernal, from Medieval Latin infernalis, from Latin īnfernus, from īnferum (“netherworld, underworld, hell”), equivalent to inferno + -al.

noun

  1. 1

    An inhabitant of the infernal regions, a demon.

Forms

plural
infernals
comparative
more infernal
superlative
most infernal
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).