Word.ws English Dictionary

horribile dictu

horribile dictu adverb: horrible to say; horribly.

Adverb

horribile dictu (not comparable)

  1. Horrible to say; horribly.
    • We first meet the Ericksons in 1973, at the wedding of the family’s eldest child, Anita, a small-town beauty for whom marriage and motherhood ultimately become traps more than prizes; her husband is not just a drinker and a poor father but, horribile dictu, a banker who forecloses on local farms...2011 May 6, Jonathan Dee, “A Midwestern Family’s Withered Roots”, in The New York Times

Origin of horribile dictu

Borrowed from Latin horribile dictu (literally “horrible to say”).

Questions about horribile dictu

What does horribile dictu mean?
Horribile dictu means horrible to say; horribly.
What part of speech is horribile dictu?
Horribile dictu is an adverb.

Words near horribile dictu in the dictionary

  1. horrendous
  2. horrendously
  3. horrendousness
  4. horrent
  5. horribile auditu
  6. horribile dictu
  7. horribilities
  8. horribility
  9. horrible
  10. horribleness
  11. horriblenesses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: horribile dictu (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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