What is "frightful"

Usage examples of "frightful".

The purpose of my visit, and the frightful abnormalities it postulated struck at me all at once with a chill sensation that nearly over-balanced my ardour for strange delvings.

Then, the Director had still been in the grip of a frightful gene-transmutation that had turned him into a thing from nightmare: a monstrous admixture of man and snake that reared out of radiant yellow mud.

I thought of the afanc, a creature which some have supposed to be the harmless and industrious beaver, others the frightful and destructive crocodile.

The airman could not understand how this man could suppress such frightful pain and muster such energy, cheerfulness and vivacity.

The squabbles over the augurship may not have attained the height of those frightful altercations heard from the house of Celer before he died, but they enlivened the Forum mightily.

The balance of the frightful herd was now circling rapidly and with bewildering speed about the little knot of victims.

At the barrier the Sagoths clambered up the steep side with truly apelike agility, while behind them the haughty queen rose upon her wings with her two frightful dragons close beside her, and settled down upon the largest bowlder of them all in the exact center of that side of the amphitheater which is reserved for the dominant race.

I feel a most frightful chump now, yes, but who can say whether that will not pass off when I get into a mob of other people in fancy dress.

Perhaps a charnel house of human bodies, dismembered and gory, raw with frightful cicatrices, oozing filth from sick and rotting sores.

Glad were they when, after three days of this frightful passage, they halted on the welcome banks of the Purgatoire, a cool mountain-stream, and saw rising before them the snowy summits of the lofty Cimmaron and Spanish peaks and knew that the desert was passed.

They were too persistent--they interfered with his duties in weaving spells to keep the frightful Dholes in their burrows, and became mixed up with his recollections of the myriad real worlds he had visited in light--beam envelopes.

I sighed beneath its wave to hide my woes, The rising tempest sung a funeral dirge, And on the blast a frightful yell arose.

The air currents dropped steeply earthward, making it difficult for Frightful to fly.

From a thousand schemes for revenge he had chosen the most frightful and ignoble that a brain maddened and enfevered by hatred could possibly conceive.

But during the night of the 8th an enormous column of vapor escaping from the crater rose with frightful explosions to a height of more than three thousand feet.