Appallment

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Shock or depression occasioned by terror or disgust; dismay; the state of being appalled. uncountable

    "the furious slaughter of them was a great discouragement and appallment to the rest: that there died upon the place all the chieftains"

Example

More examples

"the furious slaughter of them was a great discouragement and appallment to the rest: that there died upon the place all the chieftains"

Etymology

From appall + -ment. This word is likely a nonce; Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed to have coined it, but there are uses that predate Holmes and others that are unlikely to have picked it up from his use.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.