pestilential

Adjective

pestilential (comparative more pestilential, superlative most pestilential)

1. Producing, spreading, promoting or infected with pestilence; causing infection. (of people, animals, places or substances)
   • What do you fear? Why do you shun me thus. […] I am not Pestilential, nor Leaprous.1675, John Dryden, The Mistaken Husband, London: J. Magnes and R. Bentley, Act V, p. 63
   • […] the Winter keen
     Pour’d out his Waste of Snows, and Summer shot
     His pestilential Heats:a. 1749 (date written), James Thomson, “Spring”, in The Seasons, London: […] A[ndrew] Millar, and sold by Thomas Cadell, […], published 1768, →OCLC, page 20

   Synonyms:

   pestiferous

2. Spreading in the manner of pestilence. (of illnesses)
   • A long sicknesse will weary friends at last; but a pestilentiall sicknes auerts them from the beginning.1624, John Donne, “5. Meditation”, in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, London: Thomas Jones, page 95
   • […] the miseries of famine were succeeded and aggravated by the contagion of a pestilential disease.1783, Edward Gibbon, chapter 31, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, volume 5, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, page 292
3. Caused by pestilence. (of symptoms)
   • pestilential fever; pestilential sweating
   • The Scab, the Stench, and the Burning are terrible pestilential Symptoms,1752, George Berkeley, “An Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great-Britain”, in A Miscellany, Containing Several Tracts on Various Subjects, London: J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, page 40
4. During which pestilence spreads. (of a period of time)
   • Now this pestilentiall Summer being well spent, upon the approach of the Winter, and decrease of the Sicknesse, the King […] drawes nearer to the City of London,1651, John Milton, The Life and Reigne of King Charls, London: W. Reybold, page 9
   • They must expect more Pestilential times,
     That lives in th’ Equinoctial of their Crimes;1665, John Quarles, The Citizens Flight with Their Re-call, London, page 4
5. (figuratively) Having a harmful moral effect (especially one that is believed to spread in the manner of pestilence).
   • But as the Poisons of the deadliest kind
     Are to their own unhappy Coasts confin’d,
     […]
     So Presby’try and Pestilential Zeal
     Can only flourish in a Common-weal.1687, John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, 2nd edition, London: Jacob Tonson, Part 1, p. 14
   • By proclaiming individuals or entire societies to be damned, by treating their convictions as pestilential heresies, church and state had deliberately loosed fanaticism and savagery on often helpless men.1971, George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes toward the Redefinition of Culture, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Part 2, p. 47

   Synonyms:

   pernicious

6. (figuratively) Causing irritation or annoyance.
   • There’s the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs […] They’d none of ’em be missed!1885, W[illiam] S[chwenck] Gilbert; Arthur Sullivan, composer, […] The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu, London: Chappel & Co., […], →OCLC, Act I, page 9
   • […] a species of wandering trader—a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from the natives.1899, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 165, March 1899, Chapter 2, p. 480

   Synonyms:

   annoying, irritating, pestiferous, pestilent, troublesome, vexatious