evil

Plural: evils

Noun

• Profound immorality, wickedness, or suffering.
• morally objectionable behavior
• that which causes harm or destruction or misfortune; - Shakespeare
  • "the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones"
• the quality of being morally wrong in principle or practice
  • "attempts to explain the origin of evil in the world"
• Moral badness; wickedness; malevolence; the forces or behaviors that are the opposite or enemy of good.
• Something which impairs the happiness of a being or deprives a being of any good; something which causes suffering of any kind to sentient beings; harm; injury; mischief.
• A malady or disease; especially in combination, as in king's evil, colt evil.

Adjective

• Profoundly immoral and wicked; causing harm.
• morally bad or wrong
  • "evil purposes"
  • "an evil influence"
  • "evil deeds"

Adjective Satellite

• having the nature of vice
• having or exerting a malignant influence

Adj

• Intending to harm; malevolent.
• Morally corrupt.
• Unpleasant, foul (of odor, taste, mood, weather, etc.).
• Producing or threatening sorrow, distress, injury, or calamity; unpropitious; calamitous.
• Having harmful qualities; not good; worthless or deleterious.
• Undesirable; harmful; bad practice.

Adv

• wickedly, evilly, iniquitously
• injuriously, harmfully; in a damaging way.
• badly, poorly; in an insufficient way.

Examples

• an evil beast; an evil plant; an evil crop
• an evil plot to brainwash and even kill innocent people
• Do you think that companies that engage in animal testing are evil?
• Evil lacks spirituality, hence its need for mind control.
• Global variables are evil; storing processing context in object member variables allows those objects to be reused in a much more flexible way.
• He blamed his loss on the EVILS of a bad tile draw.
• If something is evil, it is never mandatory.
• It went evil with him.
• The evils of society include murder and theft.
• The ’Q’ without a ’U’ felt like an EVIL trick played by the Scrabble gods.

Synonyms

evilness, immorality, iniquity, malefic, malevolent, malign, vicious, wickedness, abandoned, arrant, bad, bad apple, bad seed, baleful, baneful, base, dark, deleterious, depraved, despicable, detrimental, devilish, diabolical, evil, flagitious, harmful, ill-intentioned, ill-natured, immoral, incorrigible, iniquitous, iniquous, injurious, knavish, maleficent, malicious, malignant, nefarious, niddering, nidering, niding, nithing, no-good, peccaminous, pernicious, reprehensible, reprobate, satanic, scathful, sinful, sinister, sordid, sullen, ungodly, unholy, vile, villainous, wicked, wrong

Antonyms

good, goodness, angelic, benign, good-minded, just, moral, righteous, well-intentioned

Related Words

villainy

Anagrams of evil