Word.ws English Dictionary

overawful

overawful adjective: excessively awful (awe-inspiring or reverential).

Adjective

overawful (comparative more overawful, superlative most overawful)

  1. (obsolete) Excessively awful (awe-inspiring or reverential).
    • [T]o free ingenuous minds from that over-awfull eſteeme of thoſe more ancient then truſty fathers […]1641, [John Milton], Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus, London: […] [Richard Oulton and Gregory Dexter] for Thomas Vnderhill, […], →OCLC, pages 30–31

Forms of overawful

comparativemore overawful
superlativemost overawful

Origin of overawful

From over- + awful.

Questions about overawful

What does overawful mean?
Overawful means excessively awful (awe-inspiring or reverential).
What part of speech is overawful?
Overawful is an adjective.

Words near overawful in the dictionary

  1. overawe
  2. overawed
  3. overawer
  4. overawers
  5. overawes
  6. overawful
  7. overawing
  8. overawingly
  9. overbait
  10. overbaited
  11. overbaiting

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: overawful (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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