Awful vs Horrible - What's the difference?
awful | horrible |
Oppressing with fear or horror; appalling, terrible.
Inspiring awe; filling with profound reverence or respect; profoundly impressive.
*, I.56:
* 1819 , Lord Byron, Don Juan , II.143:
Struck or filled with awe.
(obsolete) Terror-stricken.
Worshipful; reverential; law-abiding.
Exceedingly great; usually applied intensively.
Very bad.
(colloquial) Very, extremely; as, an awful big house.
A thing that causes horror; a terrifying thing, particularly a prospective bad consequence asserted as likely to result from an act.
* 1851 , Herman Melville, Moby Dick
* 1982 , United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Genocide Convention: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate
* 1991 , Alastair Scott, Tracks Across Alaska: A Dog Sled Journey
* 2000 , John Dean,
* 2001 , Neil K. Komesar, Law's Limits: The Rule of Law and the Supply and Demand of Rights
A person wearing a comic or grotesque costume in a parade of horribles.
Causing horror; terrible; shocking.
*
*:Such a scandal as the prosecution of a brother for forgery—with a verdict of guilty—is a most truly horrible , deplorable, fatal thing. It takes the respectability out of a family perhaps at a critical moment, when the family is just assuming the robes of respectability:it is a black spot which all the soaps ever advertised could never wash off.
*, comment=The New Yorker, March 19
, passage=Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man's horrible face. Acquaintances shunned him.}}
*, author=(Ray Bradbury)
, passage=Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now we have a horrible job; we're waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end.}}
Tremendously wrong or errant.
*{{quote-book, year=1933, title=(My Life and Hard Times), author=(James Thurber)
, passage=Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.}}
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Horrible is a antonym of awful.
As adjectives the difference between awful and horrible
is that awful is oppressing with fear or horror; appalling, terrible while horrible is causing horror; terrible; shocking.As an adverb awful
is very, extremely; as, an awful big house.As a noun horrible is
a thing that causes horror; a terrifying thing, particularly a prospective bad consequence asserted as likely to result from an act.awful
English
Alternative forms
* awfull (archaic)Adjective
(en-adj)- God ought not to be commixed in our actions, but with awful reverence, and an attention full of honour and respect.
- And then she stopped, and stood as if in awe / (For sleep is awful ).
- an awful bonnet
- I have learnt an awful amount today.
- My socks smell awful .
Usage notes
* Nouns to which "awful" is often applied: day, truth, time, place, moment, mess, night, news, state, situation, smell, thought, person, pain, movie, consequence, crime, fate, death, tragedy, man, event, disease, story, condition, mistake, taste, picture, year, calamity, doom, film, catastrophe, secret, performance, storm, end, week, shape, choice.Synonyms
* See alsoAdverb
(-)See also
* awfully.External links
* *horrible
English
Noun
(en noun)- Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles !
- A lot of the possible horribles conjured up by the people objecting to this convention ignore the plain language of this treaty.
- The pot had previously simmered skate wings, cods' heads, whales, pigs' hearts and a long litany of other horribles .
CNN interview, January 21, 2000:
- I'm trying to convince him that the criminal behavior that's going on at the White House has to end. And I give him one horrible after the next. I just keep raising them. He sort of swats them away.
- Many scholars have demonstrated these horribles and contemplated significant limitations on class actions.