Hateful

How to spell hateful

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hateful

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hateful mean?

1. adjectiveExpressing or arousing strong dislike, hostility, or malice.

Hateful in a sentence

• The manager deleted the hateful comments left on the company page.

• She found the anonymous letter both cruel and hateful.

Where does hateful come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built from the native English noun and verb 'hate', which traces back to the Old English hete (the noun, meaning malice or hostility) and hatian (the verb, meaning to detest), both rooted in the same Germanic family that gave Dutch 'haat' and German 'Hass'. To this old core English added the productive suffix '-ful', which originally meant simply 'full of' and still survives in that plain sense in words like 'spoonful'. By the time 'hateful' appeared in Middle English around the 1300s, the combination could swing in two directions: it meant either 'full of hate' (showing hatred) or 'deserving to be hated' (inspiring it), and modern usage leans firmly toward the latter. The spelling is mercifully regular, since the silent 'e' of 'hate' is simply dropped before the '-ful' ending, and note that '-ful' as a suffix carries only one 'l', unlike the standalone word 'full'.

How the word is built

• hate (from Old English hatian: to hate)
• -ful (full of, characterised by)