awful
IPA: ˈɑfʌɫ
adjective
- Very bad.
- Exceedingly great; usually applied intensively.
- (dated) Causing fear or horror; appalling, terrible.
- (now rare) Inspiring awe; filling with profound reverence or respect; profoundly impressive.
- (now rare) Struck or filled with awe or reverence.
- (obsolete) Terror-stricken.
adverb
- (colloquial) Awfully; dreadfully; terribly.
- (colloquial, US, Canada) Very, extremely.
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Examples of "awful" in Sentences
- “Oh, Jack, you awful, _awful_ liar, what shall I say to you?”
- "If you could bottle up and sell what you call awful, you'd make a million."
- "It is an awful, _awful_ thing that the boys of Polktown can even get hold of such stuff to make them so ill."
- Pearce felt he had truly seen a game of two halves after his team recovered from what he described as an "awful" opening 45 minutes.
- "Yer takin 'awful chances, miss -- just _awful_," warned the neighbor, edging backward toward her house with the air of having completed her duty.
- To Clytie he once said, of something for which he was about to ask her permission, "Oh, it must be awful, _awful_ wicked -- because I want to do it very, very much!
- Only it may be remarked that the word awful, which is here used designedly, is not meant to imply that the loss of life was unusually large or the cruelty of the captors outrageous; in both respects Alaric and his Goths would compare favourably with some generals and some armies making much higher pretensions to civilisation.
- In these and hundreds of other cases he uses remorse almost as promiscuously as the adjective "awful" is now often popularly used where a much milder word would do, and in his employment of it in relation to his dead wife, it is his sense of profound and unavailing sorrow that he desires to convey by it or his despairing consciousness of his own unworthiness of the woman he had beatified.
- This book is written from a Protestant standpoint, but by a man who was a Catholic fifty-six years before he ever became a Protestant, and we feel absolutely certain that the Catholic world will endeavor to throttle its circulation, but we have laid aside every vestige of fear from that standpoint and have made up our mind that we are no better than Martin Luther, and thousands of Protestants who were burned at the stake by Catholicism for proclaiming to the world the awful deeds of that _awful creed_.
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