Word.ws English Dictionary

nightmarish

nightmarish adjective: resembling a nightmare.

Adjective

nightmarish (comparative more nightmarish, superlative most nightmarish)

  1. Resembling a nightmare.
    • Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable each year.1994, James Howard Kunstler, The geography of nowhere: the rise and decline of America's man-made landscape, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 10
    • The dragon from under-earth,
      the nightmarish destroyer, lay destroyed as well,
      utterly without life.1999, Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page 89

nightmarish meaning in Urdu and Malayalam

nightmarish in Urdu

بھیانک, دہشت انگیز, ہولناک, کابوسی

nightmarish in Malayalam

horrific, unearthly, spine-chilling
ദുസ്വപ്നം പോലെയുള്ള, പേക്കിനാവായ, നാരകീയമായ, കരാള, പേടിപ്പിക്കുന്ന, ഭയജനകമായ

Examples of nightmarish in a sentence

  • He saw distorted, dancing shapes in a nightmarish swevening.
  • The werecrocodile laughed at him, the feral grin of a predator displaying nightmarish fangs.
  • Olimar: 'This shocker was one of several weapons wielded by the nightmarish titan dweevil.

All 15 example sentences with nightmarish

Synonyms of nightmarish

Forms of nightmarish

comparativemore nightmarish
superlativemost nightmarish

Origin of nightmarish

From nightmare + -ish.

Words formed from nightmarish

Questions about nightmarish

What does nightmarish mean?
Nightmarish means resembling a nightmare.
What is nightmarish in Urdu?
Nightmarish in Urdu is بھیانک, دہشت انگیز, ہولناک. See Nightmarish meaning in Urdu.
What part of speech is nightmarish?
Nightmarish is an adjective.

Words near nightmarish in the dictionary

  1. nightmarelike
  2. nightmares
  3. nightmarey
  4. nightmaring
  5. nightmarious
  6. nightmarish
  7. nightmarishly
  8. nightmarishness
  9. nightmary
  10. nightmen
  11. nightpiece

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nightmarish (page history and authors); nightmarish (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); nightmarish (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-nightmarish.wav.

Cite this entry: “nightmarish.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/nightmarish. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.