Word.ws English Dictionary

like hell

like hell prepositional phrase: in a manner that uses all of the strength, speed, or effort that a person can summon.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (emphatic, intensifier) In a manner that uses all of the strength, speed, or effort that a person can summon.
    • You'd better run like hell!
    • He had an innate honesty and humility, a work ethic that elevated him above most others in England. He knew what he wanted and worked like hell to try to make it happen.2018 May 4, Tom English, “Steven Gerrard: A 'seriously clever or recklessly stupid' Rangers appointment”, in BBC Sport
  2. Used ironically to express the opposite of one's intentions
    • Me do the washing up? Like hell I will!
    Synonyms:
    like fuck
  3. Bad or badly.
    • You look like hell!
    • It stank like hell down there!

Synonyms of like hell

All synonyms of like hell

Questions about like hell

What does like hell mean?
Like hell means in a manner that uses all of the strength, speed, or effort that a person can summon.
What part of speech is like hell?
Like hell is a prepositional phrase.

Words near like hell in the dictionary

  1. like fury
  2. like gangbusters
  3. like grease through a goose
  4. like grim death
  5. like heck
  6. like hell
  7. like hey-go-mad
  8. like hot cakes
  9. like I care
  10. like I cared
  11. like it or leave it

Source and license

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