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say it: AH-fuhl
awful is an adjective and adverb meaning "exceptionally bad or displeasing". It carries 7 recorded senses.
exceptionally bad or displeasing
“atrocious taste”
“abominable workmanship”
“an awful voice”
“dreadful manners”
“a painful performance”
“terrible handwriting”
“an unspeakable odor came sweeping into the room”
causing fear or dread or terror
“the awful war”
“an awful risk”
“dire news”
“a career or vengeance so direful that London was shocked”
“the dread presence of the headmaster”
“polio is no longer the dreaded disease it once was”
“a dreadful storm”
“a fearful howling”
“horrendous explosions shook the city”
“a terrible curse”
extreme in degree or extent or amount or impact
“in a frightful hurry”
“spent a frightful amount of money”
colloquialism
inspiring awe or admiration or wonder
“New York is an amazing city”
“the Grand Canyon is an awe-inspiring sight”
“the awesome complexity of the universe”
“this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath”
“Westminster Hall's awing majesty, so vast, so high, so silent”
used as intensifiers
“terribly interesting”
“I'm awful sorry”
colloquialism
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for awful come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.