Turrible

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Of very poor quality or highly unpleasant ; used informally to mean extremely or very
2. Dreadfully bad or distressing in nature ; an informal intensifier meaning exceedingly or very much
3. Awful, unpleasant or severe in a way that is hard to bear ; a dialectal intensifier meaning extremely

Etymology: "Turrible" is a pronunciation spelling of "terrible", the form that dialect and informal speech take when the word is said with the stress and vowels of everyday talk. It is not a separate word with its own history, so its story is simply the story of "terrible". That story begins in Latin. "Terribilis" meant "frightful", and it was built from "terreō", "to frighten, terrify, alarm," which is also the source of "terror" and "deter." The Latin sense of "deter" points at a striking idea: to frighten someone away from doing something. The adjective passed through Old French "terrible" into Middle English, where it kept its strong sense of fear and dread before softening into the broad word of disapproval it is today.