Find the word definition

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
sickening
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a sickening thud
▪ His head hit the floor with a sickening thud.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ His head hit the door with a sickening thud.
▪ the sickening smell of rotting meat
▪ There was a sickening crash and the sound of broken glass as the two trains collided.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And the sickening clamour of street noises beyond the cloister wall, the sickening odour of those who made them.
▪ At sunrise, the sickening reality dawned that bullets, his bullets, had mown down human beings.
▪ Many broiler chickens suffer a similar, sickening fate.
▪ She'd heard sickening tales of barbarous Gestapo torture, and of prisoners who were never seen again.
▪ The sickening feel of woollen gloves being pulled on to your hands and hitting and blunting your fingertips so touch was lost.
▪ With a sickening reverberation the words stayed in her mind all the way back to her room.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Sickening

Sicken \Sick"en\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Sickened; p. pr. & vb. n. Sickening.]

  1. To make sick; to disease.

    Raise this strength, and sicken that to death.
    --Prior.

  2. To make qualmish; to nauseate; to disgust; as, to sicken the stomach.

  3. To impair; to weaken. [Obs.]
    --Shak.

Sickening

Sickening \Sick"en*ing\, a. Causing sickness; specif., causing surfeit or disgust; nauseating. -- Sick"en*ing*ly, adv.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
sickening

"falling sick," 1725; "causing revulsion, disgust, or nausea," 1789, present participle adjective from sicken. Related: Sickeningly.

Wiktionary
sickening
  1. 1 Causing sickness or disgust. 2 (label en LGBT slang) amazing, fantastic. n. The act of making somebody sick. v

  2. (present participle of sicken English)

WordNet
sickening

adj. causing or able to cause nausea; "a nauseating smell"; "nauseous offal"; "a sickening stench" [syn: nauseating, nauseous, noisome, loathsome, offensive, vile]

Usage examples of "sickening".

From across the cell Alec heard the soft, sickening snap of joints separating.

Alaire had a sickening feeling that the Arachs had come to the end of their patience.

The act of eating, however, with all its gustatory noises, the stinking belch that filled the cavern, the rubbing of the behemothian stomach-all this, all at once, horrifying and sickening both.

Tally began to anticipate the sickening jolt of her bungee jacket pulling her up.

With sickening thuds, axes joined the cacophonous din of death and cleaved helms, opened skulls, spilled brains.

We hit with a sickening crash that seemed to stun her, and which threw Chubby and me to the deck.

In a second, every reservation he had ever had about marriage, in general, and Dolce, in particular, swept over him, filling him with a sickening panic.

The head fell out of the tree and landed on the body with a sickening glump, and I woke up.

With a sickening sense of disaster, he remembered that he was dressed in an all-enclosing, transparent suit, and that his money was inside.

Grinning horribly, Knoop made a sudden leap in the air and came down square on the AWOL bag, which went crunch, tinkle in a sickening way.

Showing, while millions of souls hurry on, The virtues of collars, from sunset till dawn, By dart or by tumble of whirl within whirl, Starting new fads for the shame-weary girl, By maggoty motions in sickening line Proclaiming a hat or a soup or a wine, While there far above the steep cliffs of the street The stars sing a message elusive and sweet.

Then a horror seized upon the negroes, and the men rushed forward to the rescue, for on the roof of the burning storehouse, now revealed through the sickening glare, stood the Other Maumer, waving a bunch of river reeds.

He saw the duo strain, exerting their enormous strength, and he saw Milly Odum shriek in abject fear, and then her arms parted from her shoulders with a sickening ripping sound, tendrils of flesh hanging from the ragged sockets, blood spurting from each cavity.

But each, unfortunately, was too much: too much poignancy dulled the taste, and too much sugar was sickening.

It sprawled over the landscape like a vast, bleeding pustule on the face of the earth, sickening the land, and poisoning all who lived in it.