ATROCIOUS • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Atrocious

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/ətrˈoʊʃəs/ Listen

adjective

Atrocious adj.

Extremely heinous; full of enormous wickedness; as, atrocious guilt or deeds.

Characterized by, or expressing, great atrocity. "Revelations... so atrocious that nothing in history approaches them."

Very grievous or violent; terrible; as, atrocious distempers. (Obs.)

Synonyms: Atrocious, Flagitious, Flagrant. Flagitious points to an act as grossly wicked and vile; as, a flagitious proposal. Flagrant marks the vivid impression made upon the mind by something strikingly wrong or erroneous; as, a flagrant misrepresentation; a flagrant violation of duty. Atrocious represents the act as springing from a violent and savage spirit. If Lord Chatham, instead of saying "the atrocious crime of being a young man," had used either of the other two words, his irony would have lost all its point, in his celebrated reply to Sir Robert Walpole, as reported by Dr. Johnson.

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Etymology of 'Atrocious'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Atrocious" Quotes from Famous Books

... time he received Tiddler's atrocious sketch, representing the author of The Insurgent as a Diogenes looking for gray-eyed girls, he had ceased to smile over the thing. The joke ...

— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors

... destiny," he averred, sitting motionless in his atrocious suit, so young yet so full of bizarre recollections, impassive at the inevitable thought that this "destiny" of his might be preparing events stranger still than ...

— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... enacted, as seems reasonable, that persons dying in hospitals and almshouses, who die without their friends claiming their remains, should be given up to the men of science, this would be subjecting poverty to the penalty of these atrocious criminals whom law distinguishes by the heaviest posthumous disgrace which it can inflict. Even cultivated minds revolt from the exposure on an anatomical table, when the case is supposed to be that ...

— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... Sydney, and were ordered to "overhaul and inspect every blackbirder," and ascertain if the "blackbirds" were really willing recruits, or had been deported against their will, and were "to be sold as slaves". And many atrocious deeds came to light, with the result, as far as Queensland was concerned, that every labour ship had to carry a Government agent, who was supposed to see that no abuses occurred. Some of these Government agents were conscientious ...

— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke

... public. Some plants, by means of grafting, bore flowers of half a dozen different varieties. Several plants had been wondrously trained into the form of kuruma, etc. Not a few of the varieties exhibited were, according to our ideas, atrocious in colouring, but many were beautiful and all were marvels of cultivation. Even greater manipulative and horticultural skill was represented in the chrysanthemums I saw at the Imperial garden party. A chief of ...

— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott

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