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monstrous

adjectiveattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈmɒnstɹəs//
  • United States//ˈmɑnstɹəs//
  • Canada//ˈmɒnstɹəs//
  • Australia//ˈmɔnstɹəs//
  • New Zealand/[ˈmɔ̟nstɹəs]/

Hideous or frightful.

adjective

  1. 1

    Hideous or frightful.

    So bad a death argues a monstrous life.

  2. 2

    Enormously large.

    a monstrous height

    The chiding billovv ſeemes to pelt the cloudes, / The vvinde ſhak'd ſurge, vvith high and monſtrous mayne, / Seemes to caſt vvater, on the burning Beare, […]

    Possibly monster pumpkins may become still more monstrous by the shoots being ringed, and so may other vegetables and fruits where quality is of less importance than mere size.

    Mr. Burns is similarly perfectly cast as a heartless capitalist willing to do anything for a quick buck, even if it means endangering the lives of those around him and Marge elegantly rounds out the main cast as a good, pure-hearted and overly indulgent woman who sees the big, good heart (literally and metaphorically) of a monstrous man-brute.

  3. 3

    Freakish or grotesque.

    The irregular and monstrous births

    He, therefore, that refuses to do good to them whom he is bound to love […] is unnatural and monstrous in his affections.

  4. 4

    Of, or relating to a mythical monster; full of monsters.

    Where thou, perhaps, under the whelming tide / Visitest the bottom of the monstrous world.

  5. 5

    obsoleteMarvellous; exceedingly strange; fantastical.

    The whole story was monstrous, and only worthy of the superstitious days in which it was written.

  6. 6

    Disabled; crippled. (A severe slur used to describe persons with disabilities.)

Etymology

From Middle English monstrous, from Old French monstrueuse, monstrüos, from Latin mōnstrōsus. Compare monstruous. By surface analysis, monster + -ous.

Forms

comparative
more monstrous
superlative
most monstrous
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).