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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

heinous.

Totally reprehensible.

7 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

adj/ˈheɪnəs/UK, US/ˈhiːnəs/UK
  1. Totally reprehensible.

    I hope they catch the person responsible for that heinous crime.
    The perpetrators of this heinous act must be brought to justice.
  2. Bad, evil or villainous.

Where this word comes from

From Middle English heynous, from Anglo-Norman hainous, heinous (compare French haineux) from Old French haïr, hadir (“to hate”) (compare Old French en-hadir (“to become filled with hate”)), from Frankish *hattjan (“to hate”) (compare Middle English hetien). More at 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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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.