Horrible

How to spell horrible

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce horrible

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does horrible mean?

1. adjectiveCausing horror, disgust, or great unpleasantness; extremely bad.

Horrible in a sentence

• The traffic on the motorway was horrible this morning.

• He apologised for the horrible smell coming from the drains.

Where does horrible come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin horribilis, meaning 'dreadful' or 'causing shudders', which was built on the verb horrere, literally 'to bristle' or 'to stand on end' (as hair does in fright) and so 'to shudder with fear'. English took it during the 1300s through Old French, where it appeared as horrible. The same horrere root underlies a whole family of fear words in English, including 'horror', 'horrid', and 'horrendous', all carrying that original sense of the skin crawling. The spelling trap lives in the ending: it is -ible rather than the more common -able, and the doubled r in the middle echoes the Latin source directly. Because so many English adjectives end in -able, writers reaching for memory often slip into the wrong suffix here.

How the word is built

• horr- (from horrere: to bristle, to shudder)
• -ible (capable of, adjective suffix)