Word.ws English Dictionary

pure evil

pure evil noun: absolute evil; that has no sense of morality or mercy at all.

Noun

pure evil (uncountable)

  1. (set phrase) Absolute evil; that has no sense of morality or mercy at all.
    • I can only say I was captivated by the film and its stealthy evocation of pure evil.2022 May 26, Peter Bradshaw, “Pacifiction review – trouble in paradise, in apocalyptic Tahitian mystery”, in The Guardian
    Antonyms:
    pure good

Adjective

pure evil (not comparable)

  1. (set phrase) Absolutely evil; having no sense of morality or mercy whatsoever.
    • This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.1886 January 5, Robert Louis Stevenson, “Henry Jekyll’s Full Statement of the Case”, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., →OCLC, page 114
    Antonyms:
    pure good

Antonyms of pure evil

Origin of pure evil

Has been rising in usage from other phrases using this sense of pure since around the 1950s. Has been rising exponentially as a set phrase since the 1990s.

Questions about pure evil

What does pure evil mean?
Pure evil means absolute evil; that has no sense of morality or mercy at all.
What part of speech is pure evil?
Pure evil can be a noun or an adjective.

Words near pure evil in the dictionary

  1. pure democracy
  2. pure ego
  3. pure egos
  4. pure endowment
  5. pure endowments
  6. pure evil
  7. pure finder
  8. pure finders
  9. pure gatherer
  10. pure gatherers
  11. pure good

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pure evil (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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