Word.ws English Dictionary

hypergelastic

hypergelastic adjective: laughing excessively.

Adjective

hypergelastic (comparative more hypergelastic, superlative most hypergelastic)

  1. (literary, rare) Laughing excessively.
    • I am young. I cry out with youth. I sing young songs. My laughter is hypergelastic. It tumbles over tables and chairs.1929 October 20, Philip DeVilbiss, “Youth”, in The Carolina Magazine, volume 1, number 2, Chapel Hill, N.C.: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, →OCLC, page 8, column 2
    • I thought of [George] Meredith, and a lecture on him when he died, his doctrine of the hypergelastic, the laughter beyond mirth.1949, Christopher Morley, The Man Who Made Friends With Himself, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., page 235

Examples of hypergelastic in a sentence

  • But he plunges the needle with such generous and hypergelastic opiate that even as we perish we bless his name.1949 March 9, Christopher Morley, “Pull Over to the Curb”, in The Saturday Review of Literature, volume XXXII, number 12, New York, N.Y....
  • The face flushes, the eyes water, the hypergelastic bore may throw his limbs and trunk around, and indulge in contact gestures like elbow digging.1975, MacDonald Critchley, Silent Language, London: Butterworths, →ISBN, page 43:
  • The Bible seems to refer to such a hypergelastic character in the saying of Ecclesiastes: "As the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of a fool.1978, Evan Esar, The Comic Encyclopedia: A Library of the Literature and History of Humor Containing Thousands of Gags, Sayings, and...

Forms of hypergelastic

comparativemore hypergelastic
superlativemost hypergelastic

Origin of hypergelastic

From hyper- + gelastic.

Questions about hypergelastic

What does hypergelastic mean?
Hypergelastic means laughing excessively.
How do you use hypergelastic in a sentence?
But he plunges the needle with such generous and hypergelastic opiate that even as we perish we bless his name.
What part of speech is hypergelastic?
Hypergelastic is an adjective.

Words near hypergelastic in the dictionary

  1. hypergastrinaemia
  2. hypergastrinemia
  3. hypergastrinemias
  4. hypergastrinemic
  5. hypergelast
  6. hypergelastic
  7. hypergelasts
  8. hypergender
  9. hypergendered
  10. hypergenesis
  11. hypergenometric

Source and license

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