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Hideous   Listen
adjective
Hideous  adj.  
1.
Frightful, shocking, or offensive to the eyes; dreadful to behold; as, a hideous monster; hideous looks. "A piteous and hideous spectacle."
2.
Distressing or offensive to the ear; exciting terror or dismay; as, a hideous noise. "Hideous cries."
3.
Hateful; shocking. "Sure, you have some hideous matter to deliver."
Synonyms: Frightful; ghastly; grim; grisly; horrid; dreadful; terrible.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hideous" Quotes from Famous Books



... the poor Jesuits were much tormented by the return to paganism of their Indians, and most especially by a hideous dwarf who set himself up as a god, and found a host of worshippers. Good Father Charlevoix thinks that 'ce petit-monstre',* despairing of being thought a man, had no resource but to give out he was a god, and remarks that, as ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... "Rather a hideous style of place," said Gilbert, as they walked towards the house; "but I think show-places, as a general rule, excel in ugliness. I daresay the owners of them find a dismal kind of satisfaction in considering the depressing influence ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon

... this ferocious tribune reigns, and we are his slaves until the moment when we shall become his victims. You are aware of my enthusiasm for the revolution: well, I am ashamed of it; it is deformed by monsters and become hideous." Madame Roland now struggled to overthrow the Jacobins—but was only overthrown herself. She was at this time celebrated for her wit and beauty. A writer of that ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... you see the point, I must give you a little history of Siegmund Stein. Any one who has seen him never forgets him. He is one of the most hideous men in New York, but it's not at all the common sort of ugliness that comes from over-eating and automobiles. He isn't one of the fat horrors. He has one of those rigid, horselike faces that never tell anything; a long nose, ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather

... factotum, an old maid of forty-six, hideous to behold, lived on the opposite side of the passage to the chevalier. Above them were the attics where the linen was dried in winter. Each apartment had two rooms,—one lighted from the street, the other from the courtyard. Beneath the chevalier's room ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac

... M'Guire, "what a derision!" What home was there for him, the victim of philanthropy? He thought of his old mother, of his happy youth; of the hideous, rending pang of the explosion; of the possibility that he might not be killed, that he might be cruelly mangled, crippled for life, condemned to life-long pains, blinded perhaps, and almost surely deafened. Ah, you spoke lightly of the dynamiter's peril; but even waiving death, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... smote this staff upon the floor, and, contracting his brows and opening his mouth to its fullest extent, laughed in a dreadful, unnatural way. He had lost the sight of one eye, and its colourless pupil kept rolling about and imparting to his hideous face an even more repellent expression ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy

... only a poor, unfortunate brother, Who is gifted with most miraculous powers Of getting up at all sorts of hours, And, by way of penance and Christian meekness, Of creeping silently out of his cell To take a pull at that hideous bell; So that all the monks who are lying awake May murmur some kind of prayer for his sake, And ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... body, our adventurer was persuaded to follow his guides, and they reached, at the end of a long flight of steps, an immense mortuary chamber. There, on a bed of cocoa-nut fibre, he found his patient, from whose mummified and hideous appearance he at once concluded that she was entirely given over to Satan and had long been a lost soul. As spiritually, so also physically, she was past all human aid; indeed she seemed dead already, and he gave his medical opinion to that effect. The countenance ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... whole-hearted dislike of the Germans, and especially of the Prussians; charges them with "cruelty, brutal arrogance, deceit, cunning, manners and customs below those of savages"; includes in the indictment professors, commercial men, and women; recites the hideous list of crimes committed during the present war; and roundly says that, however you label him, "the Prussian ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... out, but I reminded them that we were only just going to do what we had come all the way from England to do, and that there were no wild beasts or other dangers that I knew of to fear. "Oh, but there are those hideous black men, father," exclaimed Susan; "do take care of them, for I am sure that they look as if they would do ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston

... at once, as she thought of Jigger lying there in the dark room, she had a vision of her own child lying near to death in the grasp of pneumonia five years ago; and the misery of that time swept over her—its rebellion, its hideous fear, its bitter loneliness. She recalled how a woman, once a great singer, now grown old in years as in sorrow, had sung this very song to her then, in the hour of her direst apprehension. She sang it now to her own dead child, and to Jigger. When she ceased, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... distinctly out of the background that it had the effect of a person looking down from the wall at the astonished and awe-stricken spectators. The expression of the face, if any words can convey an idea of it, was that of a wretch detected in some hideous guilt and exposed to the bitter hatred and laughter and withering scorn of a vast surrounding multitude. There was the struggle of defiance, beaten down and overwhelmed by the crushing weight of ignominy. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... miles from London to East Grinstead, and in that short distance were three of these hideous instruments of death on the highway, in addition to gibbets erected in lonely bylanes and secluded spots where crimes had been committed. "Hangman's Lanes" were by no means uncommon. He was a brave ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews

... bountiful harvest, the great rice-crop of the year, was gathered in. Abundance returned to Bengal as suddenly as famine had swooped down upon it, and in reading some of the manuscript records of December it is difficult to realize that the scenes of the preceding ten months have not been hideous phantasmagoria or a long, troubled dream. On Christmas eve, the Council in Calcutta wrote home to the Court of Directors that the scarcity had entirely ceased, and, incredible as it may seem, that unusual plenty had returned..... So generous had been the harvest that the government proposed ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... there was some future career; and that career perhaps need not be blotted by the public notice of his mother's guilt. She would still fight against her foes,—still show to that court, and to the world that would then gaze at her, a front on which guilt should not seem to have laid its hideous, defacing hand. ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope

... seemed—Elisabeth had poured out. She could see the lonely fort on the Indian Frontier, sparsely held by its indomitable little band of British soldiers, and ringed about on every side by the hill tribes who had so suddenly and unexpectedly risen in open rebellion. In imagination she could sense the hideous tension as day succeeded day and each dawning brought no sign of the longed-for relief forces. Indeed, it was not even known if the messengers sent by the officer in command had got safely through to the distant garrison to deliver his urgent message asking succour. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... up to the women he saw Maslova; she was in the second row. The first in the row was a short-legged, black-eyed, hideous woman, who had her cloak tucked up in her girdle. This was Koroshavka. The next was a pregnant woman, who dragged herself along with difficulty. The third was Maslova; she was carrying her sack on her shoulder, and looking straight before her. Her face looked calm and determined. ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... to be justifiable, let him take what liberties he may with a man's face and person. It is his trade, and his business calls upon him to vilify all that he touches. But were an artist to publish a series of portraits, in which two out of a dozen were made to be hideous, he would certainly make two enemies, if not more. Mr Alf never made enemies, for he praised no one, and, as far as the expression of his newspaper ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... colours that will not blend, All hideous contrasts voted sweet; In yellow and red their Quakers dress'd, And considered ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells

... Rolls and Speaker of the Commons) about the same time was "bred a sort of clerk in old Arthur Trevor's chamber, an eminent and worthy professor of the law in the Inner Temple." On being asked what might be the name of the boy with such a hideous squint who sate at a clerk's desk in the outer room, Arthur Trevor answered, "A kinsman of mine that I have allowed to sit here, to learn the knavish part of the law." It must be observed that John Trevor was not a clerk, but merely a "sort of a clerk" ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... gold he was willing to give up being a splendid giant, who roamed freely over the beautiful mountains, and to become a hideous, ...
— Opera Stories from Wagner • Florence Akin

... that he had died in action; that his brains and ability had been given a chance; that he could have done as he would have wished to do, taken a life for a life; that he could avenge in honest warfare the hideous death of ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... with their hideous stencil decorations and bulbous domes are jostled by many new shops with blinking fronts and German merchandise. The orthodox turn their faces toward Mecca while the enlightened dream of a journey to Paris. ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade

... round intelligent face, that is almost pretty. The young niggers have very little of the real negro cast of countenance, and the little boys and girls about the streets are really pretty, and almost loveable looking; while the elders, especially the females, are hideous to behold, and are only to be tolerated, in point of looks, when they wear coloured turbans. When I see one adorned in a bonnet at the back of her head, with a profusion, inside, of the brightest artificial flowers, a bright vulgar shawl and dress, and an enormous ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter

... all." Misha, who did not know B. before, did not like her very much,—in fact, they all think she is suspicious. Aren't these youngsters peculiar? Especially Misha who is so grouchy lately—all seems dangerous to him. I never think that a woman can be anything but pretty or hideous. There is no middle, and no suspicion about them. If a woman is, what they perhaps would call "suspicious"—then there is a man's influence behind her—so find the man (and it is easy) and she is as plain as a card on the table. Baroness ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... charge on either side, With hideous strokes and importable power, Which forced him his ground to ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... be visited by all young architects; not for the mansion (except as an object-lesson, for it is like a London terrace), but for the ordinary buildings in the town. It is a paradise of old-fashioned architecture. The church is hideous; the new hotel, the "Swan," might be at Balham; but the old part of the town is perfect. There is an almshouse (which Mr. Griggs has drawn), in which in its palmy days a Lady Bountiful might have lived; even the workhouse ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas

... bridges and Swedish waterfalls which members of the family had seen years ago. There were also one or two portraits of fathers and grandmothers, and an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture by Watts. It was a room without definite character, being neither typically and openly hideous, nor strenuously artistic, nor really comfortable. Rachel roused herself from the contemplation of ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf

... "And when he could think no longer, he listened to the pickpocket" "'They all swore black and blue that Addison told the truth'" "A door was opened suddenly and he was pushed into a room" "'Stand still, I won't hurt you'" "'There!' he said with a hideous grin, and he handed Tignol the tooth" "'My dog, my dog!'" "The confessional box was empty—Alice was gone!" "'You mean that Father Anselm helped her to run away?' gasped Matthieu" "'No nonsense, or you'll ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett

... the whole city was upside down, and making merry, to the undoing of the young men who were by no means inclined to be merry, and asked for nothing but silence. In the square outside the house booths were set up, rifles cracked at the miniature ranges, merry-go-rounds creaked and grunted, and hideous steam organs roared from morning till night. The idiotic noise went on for a week. Then a President of the Republic, by way of maintaining his popularity, granted the rowdy merry-makers another three days' holiday. It cost him nothing: ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... by Mr. Dickens enabled him to personate with remarkable force the various characters of the story, and with admirable skill to pass rapidly from the hard, unbelieving Scrooge, to trusting and thankful Bob Cratchit, and from the genial fulness of Scrooge's nephew, to the hideous mirth of the party assembled in Old Joe the Ragshop- keeper's parlour. The reading occupied more than three hours, but so interested were the audience, that only one or two left the Hall previously ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... there was in those frightful charges against her, that may still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities far surpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or that Juvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more deserve to be compared to Mary Stuart than ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... deep shadows hideous instruments, invented by barbarians, could be seen: tomahawks studded with nails; poisoned javelins; pincers resembling the jaws of crocodiles; in short, the tetrarch possessed in his castle munitions of war sufficient ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert

... likely to be the great central community which Ivana said was rumored to exist in the far reaches of the Rorroh. The problem was how to locate the community through the hideous country. But Kirby presently drove the question from his head. To-morrow's evils could best be faced ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... business before him. The past had nothing more mighty than the present. The speed of the Strangers was increased a little, and the French regiments on either side kept pace with them. More shells fell. They came, shrieking through the air like hideous birds of remote ages. Some passed entirely over the advancing troops, but one fell among the French on John's right, and the column opening out, passed shudderingly around the ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler

... heart of Howell, who was at pains to hire lodgings in Paris with windows opening on the street, that he might study every passerby,[398] but who spoke of mountains in Spain in a casual way as "not so high and hideous as the Alps," or as "uncouth, huge, monstrous Excrescences of Nature, bearing nothing ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard

... the opera last night. Of course I was enchanted. The opera is a rare luxury now, and la Millefleur is all the fashion. I had the happiness of bending over her chair all the evening—don't glare so, my love, it makes you quite hideous—and accepted a seat beside her in the carriage when it was all over. A delicious petit souper awaited us in Madame's bijou of a boudoir; and I don't mind owning I was a little disguised by sparkling Moselle when I came ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... Nono showed similar leanings. On March 15, the Nationalists of Rome declared against the Pope. The National Guards joined in the movement. The Papal troops had to be called out to put down the revolt by force of arms. The hordes of Roman lazzaroni or beggars profited by the confusion to commit hideous crimes. The Pope created a high council and Chamber of Deputies with privileges of limited legislation, the Pope retaining his full veto power on whatever they might decree. But on April 29, after the Jesuits had been expelled from Sardinia, Pio Nono turned his back on these ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... the name of Baltimore or of Penn, to qualify the action of those overpowering forces which so determined the case. Slavery itself, strange as it now may seem, failed to impair the theory however it may have imported into the practice a hideous solecism. No hardier republicanism was generated in New England than in the Slave States of the South, which produced so many of the great statesmen ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... of priestcraft, and that because he played his part badly he met his doom. But something more he was. He was an instrument indeed, not of priestcraft, but of Fate, to bring home to Boris Godunov the hideous sins that stained his soul, and to avenge his victims by personating one of them. In that personation he had haunted Boris as effectively as if he had been the very ghost of the boy murdered at Uglich, haunted and tortured, and finally broken him so ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini

... each a little finer than the one within her reach. With joyous exclamations and gay little calls back to the waiting Jamie, Pollyanna—looking particularly attractive in her scarlet sweater—skipped from bunch to bunch, adding to her store. She had both hands full when there came the hideous bellow of an angry bull, the agonized shout from Jamie, and the sound of hoofs ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter

... stalls under the first story, in which squat tailors, cooks, sherbet-vendors and the like, busy at their work or smoking narghilehs. Cloths stretched from house to house keep out the sun. Mules rattle through the crowd; curs yelp between your legs; negroes are as hideous and bright clothed as usual; grave Turks with long chibouques continue to march solemnly without breaking them; a little Arab in one dirty rag pokes fun at two splendid little Turks with brilliant fezzes; wiry mountaineers in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... of which, though it is a capo d'opera of Titian, as I am no connoisseur, I say little, and thought less, except of one figure in it. There are ten thousand others, and some very fine Giorgiones amongst them, &c. &c. There is an original Laura and Petrarch, very hideous both. Petrarch has not only the dress, but the features and air of an old woman, and Laura looks by no means like a young one, or a pretty one. What struck me most in the general collection was the extreme resemblance of the style of the female faces in the mass of pictures, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... The houses are mostly scattered, being such as fortunate skippers build as an investment, and that their wives may amuse themselves with lodgers in their absence. The church is the weakest point in this otherwise charming place. The nearest, and actually the parish church, is a hideous compo structure, built in the worst of times as a chapel of ease to S. Clements. I am afraid my mother's loyalty to the parochial system will make her secure a pew there, though at the farther end of the town there is a new church which is ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... might put any neerer, without farther delay, called presently for his Pynnesse, and in the same Pynnesse put himselfe, and his honorable son L. William Howard that now is, aboord the Honor de la mer, and there remained in the fight till the battell was ended. The fight was very terrible, and most hideous to the beholder by the continuall discharging of those roaring thundering great peeces, on all sides, and so continued doubtful till about one or two of the clocke in the afternoone: about which time the Philip, whom in very truth, they had all most fancie vnto, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt

... love with an H,' Alice couldn't help beginning, 'because he is Happy. I hate him with an H, because he is Hideous. I fed him with—with—with Ham-sandwiches and Hay. His name ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll

... blew fresh from the north-east, by which he continued his course till about midnight; when there came a hideous storm of wind, thunder, rain, and lightning, which caused them to furl their sails, and lasted about three hours; but the waves continued very high above twelve hours together afterwards, it being the nature of this sea when it ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke

... birth, Nor traced thee to the scum of earth: For, scarce nine suns have wak'd the hours, To swell the fruit, and paint the flowers, Since I thy humbler life surveyed, In base, in sordid guise arrayed; A hideous insect, vile, unclean, You dragg'd a slow and noisome train; And from your spider-bowels drew Foul film, and spun the dirty clue. I own my humble life, good friend; Snail was I born, and Snail shall end. ...
— Favourite Fables in Prose and Verse • Various

... many of them actually jumped into the sea and were drowned, thus preferring death to the misery of their situation; while others hung to the ship, repenting of their rashness, and bewailing with frightful noises their horrid fate. Thus the whole vessel exhibited but one hideous scene of wretchedness. They who were subdued and secured in chains were seized with the flux, which carried many of them off. These things were proved in a trial before a British jury, which had to consider whether this was a loss which fell within the policy of insurance, the slaves being regarded ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson

... part of the Cimbri there was some loss of time and delay; but the Teutones and Ambrones set out forthwith, and speedily traversing the space which separated them from the Romans, they made their appearance in numbers countless, hideous in aspect, and in language and the cries they uttered unlike any other people. They covered a large part of the plain, where they pitched their tents and challenged ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... of the 3d of April that I endured an instant of hideous horror. We were crossing a lane of moving ice. Commander Peary was in the lead setting the pace, and a half hour later the four boys and myself followed in single file. They had all gone before, and I was standing and pushing ...
— A Negro Explorer at the North Pole • Matthew A. Henson

... two lines charged each other silently, like warriors of old, with points of glittering steel before them. Then came the merging clash, and the rows of running men broke into turbulent melees, knots of struggling, writhing bodies. Shouts and hideous curses sounded up and down the lines like the snarls of savage animals. Wounded men reeled, panting and sobbing, sometimes in their savage agony springing on their friends and rending them with their hands and teeth before they finally collapsed into ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... by the hand of freedom, Michael, my brother, you wrong me. I knew nothing of this hideous law. By my soul, my brothers, I knew not of it! ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde

... floating ash, though several feet thick, was but a treacherous surface which might break through at any moment and land them in the water below. There, certain death awaited them, for they would smother and drown under the hideous pall. With his heart in his throat Eric turned sharply to the right, trusting only to a vague sense of direction. A score of steps brought him to a slight billowing of the ash, and with a sigh of relief he knew he was ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... face! Ere night this jealous garment will have lost half its prudery. Already the prettier faces peep forth; and you may see, from the softness of the complexion, that they have been just washed free of the "allegria" that for the last two weeks has rendered them hideous. ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... brood. After deep cogitation, East and his chum had spliced a knife on to the end of a fishing-rod; and having watched Martin out, had, after half an hour's severe sawing, cut the string by which the basket was suspended, and tumbled it on to the pavement below, with hideous remonstrance from the occupants. Poor Martin, returning from his short absence, collected the fragments and replaced his brood (except one whose neck had been broken in the descent) in their old location, suspending them this ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... with a paternal smile his gloomy creations marching in dismal procession across the frontiers of France. Byron replied to him in a cry of grief which made Greece tremble, and hung Manfred over the abyss, as if oblivion were the solution of the hideous enigma ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... thing that was done? A moral Inquisition had been established. Arguing from a wrong premise a hideous conclusion had been reached. It was voiced only a few weeks ago by an official of the postoffice in Chicago, when confiscating a publication. He said in substance, if not literally: "Any ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... which he had come looked less lonesome to his eyes and far less ominous; and, for a passing instant, as he contemplated the scene hideous with old memories and threatening new sorrows, he envied Bela his narrow bed and ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... springing, clambering over each other's backs in their frenzied and futile eagerness to reach the impassive figure perched above them, while they gave vent to their rage and disappointment in the hideous uproar which had suggested such ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Malchus said bitterly, "for Carthage with its hideous tyranny, its foul corruption, its forgetfulness of its glory, its honour, and even its safety, is utterly hateful to me. I trust that never again shall I set foot within its walls. Better a thousand times to die in a battlefield than to live in ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty

... the same authorship is found in the close resemblance which the openings of both parts bear to one another: each refers to crime, the last part opening with the hideous accusations against Silius, and the adulteries of Messalina, while the first part opens with the murder of ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... The hideous and mysterious "smile" had come again, and, brief though it was, its passing found the boy's sister lying on the ground in a dead faint, the boy's stepmother cowering back, with covered eyes and shrill, affrighted ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... nervously. Her brain-picture resolved into the formless dark. From the black waters, almost at her feet, sounded, raucous and loud, the voice of the great loon. Frenzied, maniacal, hideous, rang the night-shattering laughter. The uncouth mockery of the raw—the defiance of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... the same. It will do no good if we tell the Southerner that 'we will forgive them if they will confess that they are criminals, offer to pray with them, preach with them, and labor with them over their hideous sins.'" ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... emanation of a wicked spirit, came, merely to be succeeded by the weird cries of night birds which the Ojibway chief had never seen, and of which he had never dreamed. He knew, though, that they must be hideous, misshapen creatures. But he still stood fast, although all of his warriors were eager to go, and the demon chorus came nearer and nearer, multiplying its cries, and adding to the strange notes of birds the equally strange notes of ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler

... deathly bitter. But even so? He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the vision of the gods. He gazes upon the naked face of truth. I don't pretend that the face of truth is beautiful. It is hideous beyond imagination. All hate, all savagery, all evil, glare from it, and all uncleanness is upon it. But it is the face of truth; the sight of it gives an ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... think so. Julia didn't say a word about it. In fact, I don't know how it came up. But you never heard such a woman to talk—an ugly, old, hideous little creature! But the two ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... who had fought so valiantly in the chateau, suddenly sprang to his feet. He uttered a wild, hideous, hysterical laugh and seizing an arm that protruded from the trench in front of him he hurled it far out over ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay

... Hermia recognized its individuality, wondering at the capacity for analysis which had made the painter's delineation of character so remarkable, and his brush so unerring. She stole another—a more curious—glance at him. The hideous goggles and the rumpled hair could not disguise the strong lines of his face which she saw in profile—the heavy brows, the straight nose, the thin, rather sensitive lips and the strong, cleanly cut chin. Properly dressed and valeted this queer creature might have been made presentable. But ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... a while, so faintly that they bent their ears close over the bed to catch the half-formed sounds his pale lips gave vent to—'I hope my merciful Judge will bear in mind my heavy punishment on earth. Twenty years, my friend, twenty years in this hideous grave! My heart broke when my child died, and I could not even kiss him in his little coffin. My loneliness since then, in all this noise and riot, has been very dreadful. May God forgive me! He has seen my ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... weight on my mind grew heavier; half the night I lay awake, till at last, from sheer weariness, I fell into a sort of stupor of the senses, which fled from me in the dismal dawn, and the unmanning hideous fear leapt on me out of the dark, like a beast leaping ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... At this very time Philip II., who had united in his own person the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, was endeavoring to compel, by force of arms, the Netherlands to accept his religious belief, and was engaged throughout all his immense dominions in the task of reducing men's minds to a hideous uniformity. ...
— Japan • David Murray

... of lightning, screaming that he was winding up the chain, and she must go—she could not stop. She was afraid to pass her own threshold, and fancied she heard unearthly voices, and saw spirits black and hideous all around her. "There they sit," she would say, "J——, M——," mentioning the names of all her children; "there they sit, grinning at me, and telling me I sent them to hell: they are on the beams and in the corners, and ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society

... these dismal caverns they lay until they recovered some use of their faculties, and then they had recourse to the same mischievous potion; thus consuming their health, and ruining their families, in hideous receptacles of the most filthy vice, resounding with riot, execration, and blasphemy. Such beastly practices too plainly denoted a total want of all policy and civil regulations, and would have reflected disgrace upon the most barbarous community. In order to restrain this evil, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... O you who have a care for your health! You, whose triple chin hangs on your breast, Who drag your heavy stomach of great bulk, It is fitting for you, first of all, to indulge in the warm Beverage; for indeed it will dry the hideous flow of moisture Which oppresses your limbs, and sends forth streams of perspiration from your whole body. And in a short time, the swelling of your fat belly will Gradually begin to decrease, and it will lighten your members, now oppressed by ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... cause of my perpetual motions hitherto between Wotton and London, Oct. 2nd. I obtayned a lycence of his Majestie, dated at Oxford and sign'd by the King, to travell againe.' Accordingly, on 7th. November, he took boat at the Tower wharf for Sittingbourne, 'being only a payre of oares, expos'd to a hideous storm, thence posting to Dover accompanied by an Oxford friend, Mr. Thicknesse, and crossing ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn

... live? O, haste thee to the peers, Throw this report on their incensed rage, And make them tame to their obedience! Forgive the comment that my passion made Upon thy feature; for my rage was blind, And foul imaginary eyes of blood Presented thee more hideous than thou art. O, answer not; but to my closet bring The angry lords with all expedient haste: I conjure thee but slowly; ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... street cars to tear at one's nerves with grinding brakes and clanging bells; no tramping of restless feet on the concrete all through the long, noisy hours; no shrieking midnight joy-riders; not one of the hundred sounds which make night hideous in the city. What bliss to lie there, hour after hour, in a delicious half-waking, half-sleeping, wholly exquisite stupor, only rousing myself to swallow egg-nogg No. 426, and then to flop back again on the big, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... it out all day long! What do you think you are? A tree frog, a locust, a katydid? Doesn't your mouth get tired? Does that hideous tinkle go through your hollow head all ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling

... his senses was affected; he felt it rather as a consciousness—a mysterious mental assurance of some overpowering presence—some supernatural malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about him, and superior to them in power. He knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching him; from what direction he did not know—dared not conjecture. All his former fears were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror that now held him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one thought: to complete ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce

... have been impelled, by misfortune and misery, to the vice that has degraded them. The ruin of worldly expectations, the death of those they loved, the sorrow that slowly consumes, but will not break the heart, has driven them wild; and they present the hideous spectacle of madmen, slowly dying by their own hands. But by far the greater part have wilfully, and with open eyes, plunged into the gulf from which the man who once enters it never rises more, but into which he sinks deeper and deeper down, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... the sun; and rashly fancied he had then done with it. Till, to his horror, he found the Imperial moles, by way of keeping assurance doubly sure, had been under the foundations of his very house for long years past, and had all but brought it down about him in the most hideous manner!— ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... this," I said, handing him an Antwerp peasant-woman in her hideous bonnet. "Isn't that ridiculously like Charlotte Benson? I bought it because it was so ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris

... the thing had to be gone through with. The historical evolution could not be hastened, although it was often set back. Sick Germany had many a hideous nightmare before the ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... the river, a little distance from our village. People who had known his solitary ways when he was single did not wonder at his solitary ways when he was supposed to be married. If he had not been a hideous creature to look at, his retired life with the lady might have raised suspicions; but, as things were, his hiding his ugliness and his deformity in the strictest privacy surprised nobody. He lived in our neighbourhood till he came in ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... see. Case Number One Sits (rather pale) with his bedclothes Stripped up, and showing his foot (Alas for God's Image!) Swaddled in wet, white lint Brilliantly hideous with red. ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... courtship, my dear!—and let me subjoin to it, that if now, or hereafter, I should treat this hideous lover, who is so free with me to my mother, with asperity, and you should be disgusted at it, I shall think you don't give me that preference in your love which ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... uttered the last word we all turned right about and fled like the wind. The savages instantly set up a hideous yell, and darted after us; but we made for the thick woods, and scattering in all directions, as had been previously arranged, speedily threw them off the scent, and finally ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne

... should inevitably have some disaster if we disobeyed. So we stopped and Omar said, 'come and see the Sheyk, ma'am.' I walked off and presently found about thirty people, including all my own men, sitting on the ground round St. Simon Stylites—without the column. A hideous old man like Polyphemus, utterly naked, with the skin of a rhinoceros all cracked with the weather, sat there, and had sat day and night, summer and winter, motionless for twenty years. He never prays, he never washes, he does not keep Ramadan, and ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... crowded room, The friends who come, and gape, and go; The ceremonious air of gloom— All, which makes death a hideous show! ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... innumerable others not less revolting, were committed all over France in cold blood, before the advance of the 'standard of the tyrants' had set M. Rouget de l'Isle to composing the declamatory rigmarole of the Marseillaise. Is it possible to regard a revolution which began in this hideous, cowardly, and burglarious fashion with any feelings other than those inspired by the Gordon riots of 1780 in London? If the truth in regard to these things could have been known in America in 1789, as it ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... nearly one half of the town was lost; but they rallied once more, made a vigorous charge on the foe, and drove them out. At this the Indians withdrew, forming themselves into three parties, and camped a short distance off, making the night hideous with fiendish yells and the horrid music of their war dances. During the night the garrison retreated into a still smaller and more defensible part of the town, committing the rest to flames. A brief demonstration ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... rewards could make good poets, their great master has not been wanting on his part in his bountiful encouragements; for he is wise enough to imitate Augustus if he had a Maro. The Triumvir and Proscriber had descended to us in a more hideous form than they now appear, if the emperor had not taken care to make friends of him and Horace. I confess the banishment of Ovid was a blot in his escutcheon; yet he was only banished, and who knows but his crime was capital? And then his exile was a favour. Ariosto, who, with all his faults, must ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden

... I saw a sight which was even more horrible than the death struggle of this unfortunate man; the three old women were standing up huddled close together, hideous, and grimacing with fear and horror. I went up to them, and they began to utter shrill screams, while La Jean-Jean, whose burned leg could no longer support her, fell to the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... texted walls. In vain the panting, crimson clergyman mounted the superintendent's platform, and strove to shed the oil of peace upon those seething waters. Even the class-teachers had broken the rails out of the Windsor chair-backs, and joined the hideous fray, irrespective of ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... (more hideous according to a Chinese or negro) than the middle classes, from pick of women; but oh what a scheme is primogeniture for destroying Natural Selection! I fear my letter will be barely intelligible ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... all on account of the red shoes, but the old lady thought them hideous, and so they were burnt. Karen herself was dressed very neatly and cleanly; she was taught to read and to sew, and people said that she was pretty. But the mirror told her, "You are more than ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... almost paid with his life, or at least with captivity of a singular kind. For it happened that once when he was plucking bananas above the brink of a steep hanging rock he suddenly beheld in the rocky gap a hideous face, covered with black hair, blinking at him with its eyes, and displaying white fangs as though smiling. The boy was stupefied from terror at first and then began to scurry away as fast as his legs could carry him. He ran between ten and twenty ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... recognizes that the reveille gun has been fired and those merciless fifers and drummers are rapidly finishing the reveille. And, horror of horrors! mayhap his fancies picture him standing tremblingly on post at midnight's solemn hour, his gun just balanced in his hands, while numbers of cadets in hideous sheets and other ghostly garb approach or are already standing around torturing him. And again, perchance, he challenges some approaching person in one direction, and finds to his dismay the officer of the day, the officer of the guard, and a corporal are crossing ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper

... all appearances well instructed, was in reality as ignorant as a child. The heroes whose figures peopled his imagination were too heroic, the villains too evil, and both heroes and villains were either physically beautiful or hideous, according to their characters. ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... the gate rises up a cry, Hideous broken laughter, scarce human in sound; Gaunt clawed hands, thrust through the bars despairingly, Clutch fast at the scented air, while on the ground Lie the poor plague-stricken carrions, who have found Strength to crawl forth and ...
— The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems • Aldous Huxley

... the bloated Toad, hideous and pampered with the poisonous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my bosom: Sometimes the quick cold Lizard rouzed me leaving his slimy track upon my face, and entangling itself ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis

... without flinching; yet inwardly her soul was torn to pieces. The barricading of Paris, the insolence of M. le Prince, the bravado and treachery of Cardinal de Retz, burnt up the very blood in her veins, and brought on her fatal malady, which took the form of a hideous cancer. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... watch'd, Detected in the act a brother page, Of his own years, that was his bosom friend; And thenceforth he became that other's lord, And like a tyrant he demean'd himself, Laid forced exactions on his fellow's purse; And when that poor means fail'd, held o'er his head Threats of impending death in hideous forms; Till the small culprit on his nightly couch Dream'd of strange pains, and felt his body writhe In tortuous pangs ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... any other trouble beyond that of investing 100 francs a year, increase its capital and its income in such rapid progression, that it will soon be in a position to consume as much as a hundred families of industrious workmen. Does not all this go to prove, that society itself has in its bosom a hideous cancer, which ought to be eradicated at the ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat

... face, once possibly handsome, for his eyes and forehead were conspicuously fine, showed a distortion quite apart from that given by his physical disfigurement. He was not simply angry but in a mental and moral rage, and it made him more than hideous; it made him appalling. Yet he said nothing and moved along very quietly, making, to all appearance, for his room. Would he notice them as he went by? It did not seem likely. Instinctively they had stepped to one side, and Mr. Ransom's face was in the shadow. To both it had seemed ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... seldom amusing and often outrageously coarse? They are signed with unknown names—pseudonyms doubtless; their authors, amongst whom it is sad to think that artists of talent must be counted, are like women, high born and depraved, mixing with their faces masked in hideous orgies. ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... attention than most novel-readers are inclined to give; he is often repulsive, and not unfrequently dull; but the student who has once submitted to his charm becomes spell-bound. Disgusted for a moment, he returns again and again to the strange, hideous, grotesque, but most interesting world to which Balzac alone can introduce him. Like the opium-eater, he acquires a taste for the visions that are conjured up before him with so vivid a colouring, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... Lester, 'you may beat me in faith, Vincent, but I will contend that I have beaten you in works. Had you waded, as we did, through those hideous bogs, which a poor Irishman, whose bones we left on the way, declared, 'bate all the bogs of Ireland!' you would have said the Israelites in the wilderness had a happy time of it, compared to us. Why, we were drowned, and starved, ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson

... Aspasia in the house of Pericles, though she was the teacher of intrigue, and the destroyer of morals. The most celebrated men lived in celibacy, only to secure the better opportunities of practising vice, which however did not conceal her hideous deformity in the shades, but stalked forth at noonday, emblazoned by the eloquence of a Demosthenes, and enriched by treasuries ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox

... became of tenfold size, and at last of colossal proportions. And, fearful to relate, the batrachian features humanized themselves as the monster grew, and, shaping themselves more and more into a remembered similitude, Myrtle saw in them a hideous likeness of—No! no! it was too horrible, was that the face which had been so close to hers but yesterday? were those the lips, the breath from which had stirred her growing curls as he leaned over her while they read together some ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... sel', O shake him ewre the mouth o' hell, And let him hing and roar and yell, Wi' hideous din, And if he offers to rebel ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... drum warned him; the singing had ceased. And this bitter idealist, this preacher of the hollowness of the real, wondered where were the sable trappings of woe, the hideous envisagement of them that are condemned with mortuary symbols in garbs of painted flame to the stake, faggot, axe, and headsman. None of these were visible, and the gentle spirit of the prisoner became ruffled, alarmed. He expected violence but instead they offered churchly ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... could not settle to anything that evening. He was continually going backwards and forwards, on laborious tiptoe, to see if his wife was still asleep. Margaret's heart ached at his restlessness—his trying to stifle and strangle the hideous fear that was looming out of the dark places of his heart. He came back ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... Being on excellent terms with the physician, she placed herself readily under his hands, and submitted with a good grace to his applications, laughing in his face during the whole process, for a squaw hardly knows how to smile. This case dispatched, another of a different kind succeeded. A hideous, emaciated old woman sat in the darkest corner of the lodge rocking to and fro with pain and hiding her eyes from the light by pressing the palms of both hands against her face. At Smoke's command, she came forward, very unwillingly, ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... and spokes are thrust through to give a firm hold. The sides are taken by men from different quarters of a town, or from different villages. Each side is marshalled by two drums and a harsh wind-instrument, which make a hideous noise. A few priests are generally seen squatting on the ground near by, chewing the betel-nut, and reading their laws, which are printed on slips of palm leaf. Every now and then they give a shout of encouragement. ...
— Harper's Young People, September 28, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... A hideous crash nipped the last word. I had supposed the whole prison to have been utterly destroyed by earthquake, but it was ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings



Words linked to "Hideous" :   outrageous, offensive, horrid



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