DIABOLICAL • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Diabolical

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/dˌaɪəbˈɑlɪkəl/ Listen

adjective

Diabolical, Diabolic adj.

Pertaining to the devil; resembling, or appropriate, or appropriate to, the devil; befitting hell or satan; devilish; infernal; impious; as, a diabolic or diabolical temper or act; the diabolical expression on his face; fires lit up a diabolic scene. "Diabolic power." "The diabolical institution."

Synonyms: devilish, mephistophelian, mephistophelean.

Showing a wicked cunning or ingenuity; as, the cold calculation and diabolic art of some statesmen.

Synonyms: devilish, mephistophelian, mephistophelean.

Extremely evil or cruel; atrocious; outrageously wicked; as, diabolical sorcerers under the influence of devils; diabolical torturers taking pleasure in their craft.

Synonyms: demonic, fiendish, hellish, infernal, nefarious, satanic.

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Etymology of 'Diabolical'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Diabolical" Quotes from Famous Books

... don't you? The noise of a battery in action is diabolical, and the very thought of it makes me shiver. There go the senseless lorries, all packed with music for a more hellish orchestra than you can remotely imagine. The first few bars are enough to drive you nearly frantic. It's unholy. It seems to split your head and tear your ...

— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... and explained as well as was possible why it could not be delivered at once, with the added information to soften his coming disappointment that the machine sometimes failed. The fellow merely gathered the notion that I was but a sorry magician at best, who had my diabolical hocuspocus only imperfectly under control, and he did not entirely succeed in keeping his sneers invisible. I offered quinine and such other medicines as were to be found in my traveling case, but he had no faith ...

— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... divided against itself can not stand, and that the Republic can not permanently exist half slave and half free; and they urged that this baptism of fire and blood would be impious if the cause which produced it should be spared to canker the heart of the nation anew, and repeat its diabolical deeds. A Union with slavery spared and reinstated would not be worth the cost of saving it. To argue that we were fighting for a political abstraction called the Union, and not for the destruction of slavery, was to affront common sense, since nothing but slavery had brought the Union ...

— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian

... indicated. The belief, however, did not reach its complete development, or acquire its most horrible features, until the pagan habits of thought which had originated it were modified by contact with Christian theology. To the ancient there was nothing necessarily diabolical in the transformation of a man into a beast. But Christianity, which retained such a host of pagan conceptions under such strange disguises, which degraded the "All-father" Odin into the ogre of the castle to which Jack climbed on his bean-stalk, and which blended the beneficent lightning-god ...

— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... figures on the bowl of Feathertop's pipe were in motion. Looking more closely he became convinced that these figures were a party of little demons, each duly provided with horns and a tail, and dancing hand in hand, with gestures of diabolical merriment, round the circumference of the pipe bowl. As if to confirm his suspicions, while Master Gookin ushered his guest along a dusky passage from his private room to the parlor, the star on Feathertop's ...

— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne

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