Word.ws English Dictionary

category five

category five noun: very serious, extreme.

Noun

category five (uncountable)

  1. (attributive, figuratively) Very serious, extreme.
    • China, said Cain with his clueless urgency, is “trying to develop nuclear capability.” Anyone who is gobsmacked by this category five level of ignorance concerning a country that has had nuclear weapons for more than 45 years has not been paying attention.2011 November 3, Timothy Egan, “Political Class Clowns”, in The New York Times
    • You would have to be a category-five idiot to cross the Brexit and Covid streams, so – inevitably – several government ministers did just that.2020 December 4, Marina Hyde, “Only an idiot would claim the vaccine triumph was a vindication of Brexit”, in The Guardian

Origin of category five

Primarily from the Saffir–Simpson scale, in which category five represents the most powerful type of hurricane.

Questions about category five

What does category five mean?
Category five means very serious, extreme.
What part of speech is category five?
Category five is a noun.

Words near category five in the dictionary

  1. categorizes
  2. categorizing
  3. category
  4. category error
  5. category errors
  6. category five
  7. category fraud
  8. category killer
  9. category killers
  10. category mistake
  11. category mistakes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: category five (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.

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Cite this entry: “category five.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/category_five. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.