hellacious
/hɛˈleɪʃəs
/adjective North American informal
Very great, bad, or overwhelming: there was this hellacious hailstorm...
- To the contrary, investment by multinational corporations can help alleviate the hellacious environmental conditions from which poor nations suffer.
- We book ourselves out every November so we have time to relax after a hellacious summer schedule and so we can enjoy the coming holiday season starting with Thanksgiving.
- All I know is that my wife asked me to do something, because she hasn't had a good night sleep since 2000, and she has a hellacious trial coming up.
Derivatives
hellaciously
- When some people moved into the cabin next door about Thursday and turned their hellaciously loud children loose, I broke out the noise-canceling headphones and realized I should have been doing that for at least an hour every day.
- But sterilizing a spacecraft is hellaciously difficult.
- I think that she was making a choice, a hellaciously bad one, but a choice all the same.
Origin
1930s: from hell + -acious, perhaps suggested by bodacious.
Rhymes
- twenty-four hours
- twenty-one
- twenty-pence piece
- Twenty-Six Counties
- twenty-something (thirty-something, forty-something, etc.)
- twenty-three skidoo
- twenty-twenty
- 'twere
- twerk
- twerp
- Twi
- twibill
- twice
- twice-baked
- twice-born
- twiddle
- twiddle one's thumbs
- twiddler
- twiddly
- twig
- twig furniture
- twigged
- twiggy
- rebounding lock
- rebounding pulse