netherworldn.adj.

c1485 ( G. Hay Bk. Law of Armys (2005) 71 Throu thame, all the vertue of this nethir warld be gouernyt.

1590 E. Spenser Faerie Queene ii. vii. sig. S8 This darksom neather world her light Doth dim.

1631 B. Jonson Staple of Newes ii. i. 39 in Wks. II All this Nether-world is yours, you command it, and doe sway it.

1760 F. Fawkes tr. Anacreon Odes in tr. Anacreon Wks. iii. 2 The sable Night had spread around This nether World a Gloom profound.

1797 S. Instone Poems 58 And awful Heaven bids vivid Lightnings fly..And threats destruction on the nether world.

1857 H. T. Buckle Hist. Civilisation Eng. I. xi. 645 The intellect of man in this nether world.

1964 J. A. M. Meerloo Hidden Communion ii. 39 There are many psychic equivalents which may lead us either to the mountain tops of the human spirit or to the netherworld of life.

1991 Dædalus Summer 119 The exoteric and esoteric aspects of life are the reflection of the existence of two worlds: the world that is accessible through the senses (alem ü-hiss, also known as the base, nether world (dünya), [etc.].

1640 R. Brome Antipodes sig. C2^v No Isle nor Angle in that Neather world, But I have made discovery of.

1659 in D. Laing Var. Pieces Fugitive Sc. Poetry (1853) 2nd Ser. xxix. 3 You are the man..That visitt did the neather world.

1720 J. Gay Trivia ii, in Poems I. 178 When dread Jove the son of Phœbus hurl'd..to the nether world.

1951 J. Hawkes Land ii. 21 The infernal heat of the nether world brought up by volcanic and other eruptions worked a comparable transformation on the sedimentary rocks.

1991 Artist's & Illustrator's Mag. (BNC) Sutherland drew some..heads of miners. He felt that these men had, ‘an added stature which above ground they lacked’,..in spite of the work in this nether world.

1889 G. Gissing (title) The Nether World.

1930 Sat. Evening Post (Philadelphia) 26 July 145/1 Who could possibly deny his skill in the affairs of the netherworld?

1955 P. Heron Changing Forms Art 106 It seems in itself a symbol of the artist, and particularly of his work in recent years: for it is a sort of ambassador of the Dark, of the vast netherworld which psychologists call the Unconscious.

1973 Daily Tel. 5 Apr. 15/2 When to admit a new word is always a problem, but President Nixon has made it with ‘netherworld’ (‘the netherworld of deceit, subversion and espionage’).

1975 Times Lit. Suppl. 13 June 679/1 Occasionally he even descended from Baltimore into this netherworld of benighted yokels and hillbillies.

1984 R. Twisk in Listener 15 Mar. 17/1 He is not exactly the type one would expect to be intimately connected with that ‘East European netherworld’.

1828 T. Carlyle in Foreign Rev. 1 445 In this way, can the nether-world Scapin sport with the perplexed Beauty.

1869 H. F. Tozer Res. Highlands of Turkey II. 300 Besides this nether-world character.

a1882 D. G. Rossetti Ballads & Sonnets 328 What netherworld gulf-whispers doth she hear, In answering echoes from what planisphere?

1991 P. Holton Mother without Mask (BNC) 79 All of us have our underworld and nether world creatures with whom we carry on some inner conversation.