egregious
/ɪˈɡriːdʒəs
/adjective
1Outstandingly bad; shocking: egregious abuses of copyright...
- That's the kind of service recovery you'd expect from a decent company, especially after being publicly outed for egregious customer abuse.
- Opposition to the extremist activities of the university unions grew stronger as their abuses became more egregious.
- The desire for vengeance is very strong, simply because the abuses were so egregious.
2 archaic Remarkably good.I am not so egregious a mathematician as you are....
- When he wanted to draw some one splendid and egregious, it was Clive he took for a model.
Derivatives
egregiously
- There is something terribly wrong in this country when a major story like that can be printed which is so egregiously wrong.
- The average price of U.S. electricity fell throughout the twentieth century, and it has kept falling since, except in egregiously mismanaged markets such as California's.
- We live in a society which has become so accustomed to accepting egregiously mindless anti-social behaviour as meaningful rebellion that it could see a hero lurking somewhere in a hooligan.
egregiousness
- We hardly recognize the egregiousness of insults like this when they most urgently need to be remembered.
- The Times had its several pomposities and egregiousness.
- The English dub is awful, of course, but since 99% of all anime is served up this way in North America, it becomes increasingly difficult to put red marks on a disc for this egregiousness.
Origin
Mid 16th century (in sense 2): from Latin egregius 'illustrious', literally 'standing out from the flock', from ex- 'out' + grex, greg- 'flock'. Sense 1 (late 16th century) probably arose as an ironical use.
congregate from Late Middle English:
The Latin word for a herd or flock was grex, giving congregare, meaning ‘to collect into a herd or flock, to unite’. Gregarious (mid 17th century), meaning ‘fond of company’, is also descended from grex, as are aggregate (Late Middle English) ‘herd together’; egregious (mid 16th century) ‘standing out from the herd’ and originally complimentary; and segregation (mid 16th century) ‘set apart from the herd’.