Heinous

adj

adj ·2 syllables ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Totally reprehensible.

    "I hope they catch the person responsible for that heinous crime."

  2. 2
    Bad, evil or villainous.
Adjective
  1. 1
    extremely wicked, deeply criminal wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
abominableodiouswickedabandonedabhorrentabject

Example

More examples

"Any murder is gruesome but this one was especially heinous."

Etymology

From Middle English hainous, from Old French haïneus (compare French haineux) from haïr (“to hate”), hadir (“to hate”) (compare Old French enhadir (“to become filled with hate”)), from Frankish *hattjan (“to hate”) The fluctuation between pronunciations with /eɪ/ and /iː/ is old; the former reflects adoption of an unmonophthongised pronunciation of Old French -ai-, while the latter reflects a monophthongised form.

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