Atrocious

How to spell atrocious

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce atrocious

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does atrocious mean?

1. adjectiveOf very poor quality, or shockingly cruel and wicked.

Atrocious in a sentence

• The hotel served an atrocious breakfast that nobody could finish.

• Driving through the storm was made worse by the atrocious road conditions.

Where does atrocious come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin atrox, with the stem atrocis, meaning 'fierce', 'savage' or 'cruel'. That adjective was built from ater, meaning 'black', 'dark' or 'gloomy', joined to a second element related to the idea of appearance or look (the same family that gives us oculus, 'eye'), so the original sense was something like 'of a dark and threatening aspect'. The related noun atrocitas described downright savage cruelty, and English borrowed the family in the early 1600s, partly through the French atroce. At first it kept its grave sense of brutal wickedness, as in an atrocious crime, but over time it softened in casual speech to mean simply 'very bad' or 'dreadful', as in atrocious weather. The spelling trap is the ending: the 'sh' sound is written with -ci-, giving -cious, not -tious or -shus, a pattern shared with words like 'gracious' and 'spacious'.

How the word is built

• atroci- (from Latin atrox, atrocis: fierce, cruel)
• -ous (adjective suffix: full of)