Word of the Day:
scandalous
What It Means
Of a thing: causing or having the nature of a scandal; regarded as so immoral or wrong as to be extremely disgraceful; despicable, shameful.
Of a person: delighted by scandal.
Of speech or writing: defamatory, malicious.
Scandalous in Context
“There was a blizzard on. The cold was something frightful. Made one quite thankful to get back to the fug, though as a rule I think the way these trains are overheated is something scandalous.”
Did You Know?
From Late Middle English scandalouse (“disgraceful, shameful”), borrowed from Old French scandaleux (“scandalous”) (modern French scandaleux), from Medieval Latin scandalōsus, from Ecclesiastical Latin scandalum (“scandal”) + Latin -ōsus (suffix meaning ‘full of; prone to’ forming adjectives). Scandalum is derived from Ancient Greek σκᾰ́νδᾰλον (skắndălon, “offence, scandal; snare, trap”); further etymology uncertain, possibly from Pre-Greek or Proto-Indo-European *skend- (“to jump”) (referring to a device for climbing or jumping on, such as might be used by someone setting a trap). By surface analysis, scandal + -ous (suffix forming adjectives from nouns, denoting presence of a quality in any degree (typically an abundance), or a relation to the nouns).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: scandalous (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “scandalous.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/scandalous. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.