horripilating

English

Etymology

From horripilate +‎ -ing.

Pronunciation

(Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /hɒˌɹɪpɪˈleɪtɪŋ/
(General American) IPA^(key): /hɑˌɹipiˈleɪtiŋ/, /-ɾiŋ/
Hyphenation: hor‧ri‧pi‧lat‧ing

Adjective

horripilating (comparative more horripilating, superlative most horripilating)

Causing horripilation.
(figuratively) Horrendous, horrifying, terrifying.
- 1845, Edmund Hepple, Truth and Falsehood Defined and Exemplified: A Scene at Quintern Abbey, Newcastle upon Tyne: Printed by T. & J. Hodgson, Union Street, →OCLC, page 105:
  I was sadly shocked, however, when he said he could prove that God hates the truth; the effect was horripilating.
- [1873], W[illiam] S[tarbuck] Mayo, chapter XVII, in Never Again (The Library of Favourite Authors, British and Foreign; I), London: Ward, Lock, & Tyler, Warwick House, Paternoster Row, →OCLC, page 192:
  Fear, the product of guilt, is a true night-plant. Like some of those gigantic fungi the botanists tell of, it springs up in the dark, and in an hour of restless tossing, sudorific, horripilating wretchedness, canopies our bed with a phantom toad-stool of gigantic size. The load that the conscience can jauntily stagger under in the broad light of day, […] will, in the gloom and silence of the night, wear its bearer to his knees.
- 1995, Richard Taruskin, “Resisting the Ninth”, in Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 235:
  Always something of a timpani concerto among symphonies—besides the famous solos in the Scherzo there is the horripilating tattoo that all but drowns out the first movement recapitulation, […]
- 2001, Melanie C. Hawthorne, “1900, December 10: Women and Education: In which Rachilde’s Mother is Admitted to the Asylum of Charenton and Some Deficiencies in Rachilde’s Education become Apparent”, in Rachilde and French Women’s Authorship: From Decadence to Modernism, Lincoln, Neb., London: University of Nebraska Press, →ISBN, page 190:
  In Rachilde's fiction, however, scientists or doctors are associated with sexual knowledge that is both unwelcome and yet empowering, the sort of knowledge that makes a young girl's hair stand on end […]. This horripilating experience is unwelcome, because it comes in the form of unwanted sexual advances at a time when the heroine is still innocent, but ultimately empowering, because it frees the heroine from any further vulnerability to seduction and gives her power over men.
- 2015, Cynthia Harrod-Eagles, Keep the Home Fires Burning, London: Sphere Books, →ISBN:
  But what could you do about bombs dropped on you from the air? Especially in the dead of night. The idea of being killed in your sleep by an enemy you'd never even seen was horripilating.

Synonyms

See Thesaurus:frightening

Related terms

Verb

horripilating

present participle and gerund of horripilate.