Word.ws English Dictionary

hellbrew

hellbrew noun: a horrible liquid mixture.

Noun

hellbrew (plural hellbrews)

  1. A horrible liquid mixture.
    • The only virtue of tequila, so far as I know, is cheapness. It has no flavour. It stupefies more quickly and more cheaply than any hellbrew I have yet encountered.1960, Stephen Lister [pen name; Digby George Gerahty], In Search of Paradise, London: Peter Davies, page 120
    • No one has spoken, and indeed written, more fiercely than I against the farmers who bedew their fields with ingenious hellbrews, neither knowing nor caring whether goldfinches will suffer from the shortage of thistles or foxes gorge themselves on unwholesome wood pigeons.1965 May 26, Punch, page 778
  2. A hellish mess.
    • But—known only to a handful of Hasbrouck Heights residents—the shadow of her finger thrusts down through a dozen years to stir two lives into a hellbrew.1934 June 19, Bergen Evening Record, volume XXXX, number 12 (total 11478), Hackensack, N.J., page 22
    • As frequently used, Fascism signifies anything you want, as long as it is not openly favoring Communism. Communists in Toronto call the Quebec Catholic social program “Fascist,” or to be more precise, a Fascist “hellbrew.”1936 October 10, John LaFarge, “Fascism or Communism: Which the Greater Danger?”, in America: A Catholic Review of the Week, volume LVI, number 1, New York, N.Y.: The America Press, page 4

Examples of hellbrew in a sentence

  • While she was heating and churning the hellbrew in a double boiler, her sight began to fade.1980, Alfred Bester, Golem¹⁰⁰, New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 147:
  • Clicko’s husband had not actually been spoken, and we had not been catapulted into this little hellbrew, but were still on safe ground, chatting of this and that.1983, Peter De Vries, Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, Boston, Mass.; Toronto, Ont.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 97:
  • DRAGON Spirit – the very name conjures up a cheap Chinese hellbrew, the kind of electric soup which is bought with multiples of “the price of a cup of tea”.1990 February, Stewart C. Russell, “Dragon Spirit”, in Amiga Computing, page 42:
  • The rest was a hellbrew, sinkpit, gasping, gagging, ancient dung history of rot and wet and corruption and decay.1994 October–December, The Angry Corrie, number 20, page 13:

Forms of hellbrew

pluralhellbrews

Origin of hellbrew

From hell + brew.

Questions about hellbrew

What does hellbrew mean?
Hellbrew means a horrible liquid mixture.
How do you use hellbrew in a sentence?
While she was heating and churning the hellbrew in a double boiler, her sight began to fade.
What part of speech is hellbrew?
Hellbrew is a noun.
What is the plural of hellbrew?
The plural of hellbrew is hellbrews.

Words near hellbrew in the dictionary

  1. hellborn
  2. hellbound
  3. hellbox
  4. hellboxes
  5. hellbred
  6. hellbrew
  7. hellbrews
  8. hellbroth
  9. hellbroths
  10. hellburner
  11. hellburners

Source and license

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