horrid
/ˈhɒrɪd
/adjective
1Causing horror: a horrid nightmare...
- The Newscaster, reporting on the scene, tries to distract his audience from the horrid nightmare by relating an Englishman's views on Steel Tariffs.
- For the past few months, she has been living a horrid nightmare after the sudden death of her ten-year-old daughter, Nicole Pierre.
- Why couldn't this be a dream, a horrid nightmare?
1.1 informal Very unpleasant: the teachers at school were horrid a horrid brown colour...
- They were horrid, smelly, dirty and obstinate things that dominated your life right through every winter, and no-one who doesn't have to would even think of having one.
- I was wearing the standard graduation robe in a horrid red colour.
- ‘Behind the bar, it was so smelly and horrid,’ she recalls, nose wrinkling.
2 archaic Rough; bristling: a horrid beard...
- Our caves are not like her castle, and when we pluck fruit from the trees we have nursed so carefully in crevices, away from the wind, we have to climb their rough and horrid trunks.
Derivatives
horridly
- He sends away samples and discovers that water is horridly polluted.
- Puccini took this even further and his heroes and heroines were little seamstresses dying of consumption, geisha girls being dumped by horridly racist American naval officers, and even cowboys and cowgirls!
- ‘What a book a Devil's Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature,’ Darwin wrote to a friend in 1856.
horridness
- There's even another ringing endorsement of Sweden, and another disquisition on the joys of fairness, equity, and the horridness of our ‘stagnant social mobility’.
- Language is not equipped to communicate its horridness.
- Imagine Principal Skinner's mother in The Simpsons and multiply by ten; a hilarious portrait of horridness.
Origin
Late 16th century (in the sense 'rough, bristling'): from Latin horridus, from horrere 'tremble, shudder, (of hair) stand on end'.