pandemoniac
English
Etymology
From pandemonium + -ac, after demoniac.[1]
Adjective
pandemoniac (comparative more pandemoniac, superlative most pandemoniac)
- Relating to, resembling, or characteristic of, a pandemonium.
- 1821, Thomas Henry Marshal, “The Exile restored”, in The Irish Necromancer; or, Deer Park. A Novel., volume I, London: […] A. K. Newman and Co., […], page 45:
- I was taken out of my bed, overpowered with the unnatural heavy sleep, as usual, when the necromancer chooses to give me a pandemoniac lodging, to please his own demoniac fancy.
- 1825 December, “An Essay on a Common-Place Topic”, in The Oriental Herald, volume VII, number 24, London, page 478:
- We believe, too, that this most ungodly garment was actually black; and there its wearer stood, perking his pandemoniac stock in the face of the pious door-keeper, like Satan at the gates of heaven!
- 1838, Henry William Lovett, “The Fifth Trumpet and the Fifth Vial, the First Stage of the French Revolution”, in The Revelation of Saint John Explained, second edition, London: Whittaker & Co., […], page 245:
- In this time of horror the pandemoniac legislature issued decree after decree with terrific rapidity for the destruction of entire towns, the waste of large districts, and the indiscriminate massacre of their inhabitants, of both sexes and all ages; and the decrees were executed to their utmost possible extent.
Noun
pandemoniac (plural pandemoniacs)
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{{rfdef}}.- 1838, James (the Elder;) Humphrys, The Pioneers in Contrast. A Disquisition Descriptive Throughout of the Truly Simoniacal Use and Anti-Christian Abuse of Water, as at this Day Employed in the Matter of Baptism, Together with a Dialogue and Address: Being Absolutely Conclusive as to the Schismatical Character of the National System, Etc., London: […] E. Palmer and Son, […], pages 96–97:
- […] and never did a conclave of popish pandemoniacs with their own Vulcan seated as and for their president, confronted by his deputy with hammer, tongs, and poker, for his triple trident, meet at any time (except to concoct and perpetrate a deed of blood, more or less direct) to determine upon an affair of more deep and dark importance, than that of the aforesaid junta of “old wives.”
- 1872 June 29, “Bar One”, in Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading, volume I, number 26, Boston, Mass.: James R. Osgood and Company, page 722, column 1:
- […] and in his two hands were two wind instruments, which he used alternately for the production of sounds delicious to boys and pandemoniacs.
- 1875 June 5, R., “Our Manners”, in Vanity Fair, London, page 311, column 1:
- The question is, therefore, whether we are to practise and to endure bad manners, and thereby to revert, as we must in that case, to the state of nature and the uses of pandemoniacs; or whether it would be not best and wisest for each of us both to pay to and to claim from all, those manifestations of mutual respect in which Good Manners consist.
References
- “pandemoniac”, in Merriam–Webster Online Dictionary.