Word.ws English Dictionary

paving the road to hell

paving the road to hell is the present participle and gerund of pave the road to hell.

Meaning of pave the road to hell

Verb

pave the road to hell (third-person singular simple present paves the road to hell, present participle paving the road to hell, simple past and past participle paved the road to hell)

  1. (idiomatic) To lead to a disaster by acting with good intentions.
    • In the other direction, treatments that were decried in their time as paving the road to hell, including vaccination, transfusions, anesthesia, artificial insemination, organ transplants, and in-vitro fertilization, have become unexceptional boons to human well-being.2015 August 1, Steven Pinker, “The moral imperative for bioethics”, in The Boston Globe, archived from the original on 03 Dec 2015

Questions about paving the road to hell

What is paving the road to hell the present participle and gerund of?
Paving the road to hell is the present participle and gerund of pave the road to hell.

Words near paving the road to hell in the dictionary

  1. paving
  2. paving slab
  3. paving slabs
  4. paving stone
  5. paving stones
  6. paving the road to hell
  7. paving the way
  8. paving tile
  9. paving tiles
  10. pavings
  11. pavingstone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: paving the road to hell (page history and authors); pave the road to 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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “paving the road to hell.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/paving_the_road_to_hell. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.