Word.ws English Dictionary

felonous

felonous adjective: evil, wicked.

Adjective

felonous (comparative more felonous, superlative most felonous)

  1. (obsolete) Evil, wicked.
    • I Pilate am the falſeſt, alas, / And moſt vniuſt that by vnrighteous / And wicked doome to Iewes deſpiteous, / Deliuered vp the Lord of life to dye, / And did acquite a murdrer felonous, […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto VII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 289

Forms of felonous

comparativemore felonous
superlativemost felonous

Origin of felonous

From Middle English felenous(e), felenows, fellenouse, felonous(e), felonows(e), felonus, from Old French feloneus. By surface analysis, felon (“an evil or wicked person”) + -ous.

Questions about felonous

What does felonous mean?
Felonous means evil, wicked.
What part of speech is felonous?
Felonous is an adjective.

Words near felonous in the dictionary

  1. felonize
  2. felonized
  3. felonizes
  4. felonizing
  5. felonocracy
  6. felonous
  7. felonries
  8. felonry
  9. felons
  10. felonweed
  11. felonwood

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: felonous (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: “felonous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/felonous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.