Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Wicked; abominable.
- adjective Informal Very unappealing; ugly.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Hateful; odious; reprehensible.
- Hence Reprehensibly great; enormous; aggravated: sometimes used (in a similar sense) of persons.
- Synonyms Wicked, Infamous, etc. (see
atrocious ); flagitious, dreadful, horrible.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Hateful; hatefully bad; flagrant; odious; atrocious; giving great offense; -- applied to deeds or to character.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective Totally
reprehensible .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective extremely wicked, deeply criminal
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word heinous.
Examples
-
Turkey's foreign ministry condemned what it called a "heinous assassination."
Kurds Step Into Syria's Protest Mix Nour Malas 2011
-
Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said she was outraged by what she called a "heinous" bombing.
-
The family of the 22-year-old suspect in the mass shooting in Arizona is expressing sorrow for what they called heinous events.
The Seattle Times 2011
-
The family of the 22-year-old suspect in the mass shooting in Arizona is expressing sorrow for what they called heinous events.
-
The family of the 22-year-old suspect in the mass shooting in Arizona is expressing sorrow for what they called heinous events.
-
He described what he called the heinous nature of the crime, insisting that a troubled past couldn't justify Komisarjevsky's actions.
CNN.com 2011
-
Meckel, a former Army commander during Operation Iraqi Freedom, is offering a cash reward to anyone who has information about the shooting, which he called heinous and malicious.
-
Just as heinous is that every year, more and more municipal governments pretend that they plant these all-seeing menaces in the interest of “safety.”
Think Progress » Tucker Carlson’s new website kicks off with jokes about rape, being gay. 2010
-
The truth is, Barack Obama supports the death penalty for certain heinous crimes, and he led the effort to reform the death penalty system to ensure that it's administered fairly and that convictions stand in court.
Obama Campaign Responds To “Victims” Ad - Swampland - TIME.com 2008
-
Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment, said Dawkins.
arby commented on the word heinous
An appropriately ugly word.
July 19, 2007