pestilential

UK /ˌpɛstɪˈlɛnʃi.əl/ US /ˌpɛstɪˈlɛnʃi.əl/
adj 5

Definitions

adj

1

Of or relating to pestilence or plague.

1675, John Dryden, The Mistaken Husband, London: J. Magnes and R. Bentley, Act V, p. 63, What do you fear? Why do you shun me thus. […] I am not Pestilential, nor Leaprous.

[…] the Winter keen Pour’d out his Waste of Snows, and Summer shot His pestilential Heats:

2

Of or relating to pestilence or plague.

A long sicknesse will weary friends at last; but a pestilentiall sicknes auerts them from the beginning.

[…] the miseries of famine were succeeded and aggravated by the contagion of a pestilential disease.

3

Of or relating to pestilence or plague.

pestilential fever; pestilential sweating

The Scab, the Stench, and the Burning are terrible pestilential Symptoms,

4

Of or relating to pestilence or plague.

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,

They must expect more Pestilential times, That lives in th’ Equinoctial of their Crimes;

5

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.

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.

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