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Evil   /ˈivəl/   Listen
adjective
Evil  adj.  
1.
Having qualities tending to injury and mischief; having a nature or properties which tend to badness; mischievous; not good; worthless or deleterious; poor; as, an evil beast; and evil plant; an evil crop. "A good tree can not bring forth evil fruit."
2.
Having or exhibiting bad moral qualities; morally corrupt; wicked; wrong; vicious; as, evil conduct, thoughts, heart, words, and the like. "Ah, what a sign it is of evil life, When death's approach is seen so terrible."
3.
Producing or threatening sorrow, distress, injury, or calamity; unpropitious; calamitous; as, evil tidings; evil arrows; evil days. "Because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel." "The owl shrieked at thy birth an evil sign." "Evil news rides post, while good news baits."
Evil eye, an eye which inflicts injury by some magical or fascinating influence. It is still believed by the ignorant and superstitious that some persons have the supernatural power of injuring by a look. "It almost led him to believe in the evil eye."
Evil speaking, speaking ill of others; calumny; censoriousness.
The evil one, the Devil; Satan. Note: Evil is sometimes written as the first part of a compound (with or without a hyphen). In many cases the compounding need not be insisted on. Examples: Evil doer or evildoer, evil speaking or evil-speaking, evil worker, evil wishing, evil-hearted, evil-minded.
Synonyms: Mischieveous; pernicious; injurious; hurtful; destructive; wicked; sinful; bad; corrupt; perverse; wrong; vicious; calamitous.


noun
Evil  n.  
1.
Anything which impairs the happiness of a being or deprives a being of any good; anything which causes suffering of any kind to sentient beings; injury; mischief; harm; opposed to good. "Evils which our own misdeeds have wrought." "The evil that men do lives after them."
2.
Moral badness, or the deviation of a moral being from the principles of virtue imposed by conscience, or by the will of the Supreme Being, or by the principles of a lawful human authority; disposition to do wrong; moral offence; wickedness; depravity. "The heart of the sons of men is full of evil."
3.
Malady or disease; especially in the phrase king's evil, the scrofula. (R.) "He (Edward the Confessor) was the first that touched for the evil."


adverb
Evil  adv.  In an evil manner; not well; ill; badly; unhappily; injuriously; unkindly. "It went evil with his house." "The Egyptians evil entreated us, and affected us."





Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48


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"Evil" Quotes from Famous Books



... barrels of flour had arrived in vessels under Spanish and Swedish flags, chiefly from Boston. This sort of unfaithfulness to a national cause is incidental to most wars, but rarely amounts to as grievous a military evil as in 1812 and 1813, when both the Peninsula and Canada were substantially at our mercy in this respect. With the fall of Napoleon, and the opening of Continental resources, such control departed from American hands. In the succeeding twelvemonth ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... home. She was convinced that her boy would be far better off there than upon the earth, and was consoled. But such truly Russian people as Kerbakh, Ostrov, and others would not be consoled. They let loose evil ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... formed a connection with The Anderson (Indiana) Democrat and contributed verse and locals in more than generous quantities. He was happy in this work and had begun to feel that at last he was making progress when evil fortune knocked at his door and, conspiring with circumstances and a friend or two, induced the young poet to devise what afterward seemed to him the gravest of mistakes,—the Poe-poem hoax. He was then writing for ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... its logical conclusion. Suppose, for instance, that every woman I have ever met in this town should suddenly take it into her head to invite me to a dinner. Here I—perfectly unsuspicious and innocent of any evil, because of a purely arbitrary law which I did not help to make—would not only have to sit down and write a hundred regrets, but would have to pay a hundred calls within the next two weeks. It makes me ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... together a few proverbs and similes, which, it seems to us, do no kind of justice to the humor and invention of the people. Most of them have no characteristic at all, except coarseness. We hope there is nothing peculiarly American in such examples as these:—"Evil actions, like crushed rotten eggs, stink in the nostrils of all"; and "Vice is a skunk that smells awfully rank when stirred up by the pole of misfortune." These have, beside, an artificial air, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various


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