appallment
appallment noun: shock or depression occasioned by terror or disgust; dismay; the state of being appalled.
Noun
appallment (uncountable)
- Shock or depression occasioned by terror or disgust; dismay; the state of being appalled.
- the furious slaughter of them was a great discouragement and appallment to the rest: that there died upon the place all the chieftains1622, Francis, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Alban [i.e. Francis Bacon], The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh, […], London: […] W[illiam] Stansby for Matthew Lownes, and William Barret...
- I supopse we might way that if there truly has been a resurgence of interest in the state of the mind and culture of graduating students , particularly the abler ones, it could be attributed to a kind of appallment - appallment of the teacher at his own failures; appallment of the student at how...1965 ·, Joseph W. Cohen, The Superior Student in American Higher Education, page 99
Forms of appallment
| alternative form | appalment |
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Origin of appallment
From appall + -ment. This word is likely a nonce; Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed to have coined it, but there are uses that predate Holmes and others that are unlikely to have picked it up from his use.
Questions about appallment
- What does appallment mean?
- Appallment means shock or depression occasioned by terror or disgust; dismay; the state of being appalled.
- What part of speech is appallment?
- Appallment is a noun.
Words near appallment in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: appallment (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “appallment.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/appallment. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.