hellscape
English
Etymology
From hell + -scape.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ˈhɛl.skeɪp/
Noun
hellscape (plural hellscapes)
- A hellish landscape.
- a Dantesque hellscape
- 1990, Stephen King, “The Langoliers”, in Four Past Midnight:
- As they crossed the Western Slope toward Utah, the dark began to come down again. The setting sun threw an orange-red glare over a fragmented hellscape that none of them could look at for long; one by one, they followed Bethany's example and pulled their windowshades.
- 2009 September 7, Janet Maslin, “News at Styx: Who’s Hot in Hades”, in New York Times:
- Mr. Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” treats his newest novelistic conceit as an occasion to toss every possible ingredient into a fanciful hellscape and then let these elements run wild.
- (figuratively) An exceptionally unpleasant, disagreeable, or harsh place or thing.
- 2015 August 14, Chris Eggertsen, “Miley Cyrus just got really honest about the hellscape that was 'Hannah Montana'”, in HitFix:
- Miley Cyrus just got really honest about the hellscape that was "Hannah Montana"
- 2021 February 2, Katharine Murphy, “Scott Morrison must heed the lesson of Donald Trump and slap down Craig Kelly”, in The Guardian:
- Avoiding a cacophony is a worthy objective, because Australia has managed to largely sidestep the post-truth hellscape the US has endured during the pandemic because politicians, by and large, have chosen to inhabit a universe of shared facts and common messages.
- 2022 October 27, Lauren Hirsch, quoting Elon Musk, “Elon Musk Reaches Out to Advertisers Ahead of Deadline for Twitter Deal”, in The New York Times, ISSN 0362-4331:
- But, he added, “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences!”
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Further reading
- “hellscape”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
- hellscape at Google Ngram Viewer