Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Harmful or malicious in intent or effect.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Doing or producing harm; acting with evil intent or effect; harmful; mischievous: as, a maleficent enemy or deed.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Doing evil to others; harmful; mischievous.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective
Harmful orevil in intent or effect.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective harmful or evil in intent or effect
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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‘To free the world of a certain maleficent object.’
Blonde, Black and Blood Red nathreee 2010
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Latins called the maleficent ghosts of the dead, Larvae, and called the beneficent or harmless ghosts, Lares, or Manes, or Genii, according to Apuleius.
Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation Lafcadio Hearn 1877
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Other things do not: we call them bad or "maleficent".
MercatorNet Anthony Fisher 2009
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He's a kind of maleficent Candide, who blackmails, lies, betrays, cheats, fucks, namedrops, marries and blunders his way to the top – and assumes no one will notice.
Capital Pundits Parodied: An Anti-Mensch's Faux Memoirs 2001
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now, what i really wanted to say was this: i'm hoping burton does do his "maleficent" movie - it sounds cool!
Disney Buzz: Pirates 4 Shooting This Summer, Burton's Next? « FirstShowing.net 2010
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As personifications of radical otherness, the monsters of supernatural horror are often identified with the divine, especially with its more dreadful, maleficent aspects.
Timothy Beal: There's No Such Thing As Osama Bin Laden Timothy Beal 2011
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It was something that was being awakened in him, an image incarnate of outward conditions, as cruel, as ugly, as maleficent as were those outward conditions.
CHAPTER XII 2010
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As personifications of radical otherness, the monsters of supernatural horror are often identified with the divine, especially with its more dreadful, maleficent aspects.
Timothy Beal: There's No Such Thing As Osama Bin Laden Timothy Beal 2011
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If something could bring a great evil from his own world into this one, an evil which none here including Clothahump could understand, why could not that same maleficent force reverse the channel one day and thrust some similar unmentionable horror on his own unsuspecting world?
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Sanjeev's speeding BMW is a symbol of gleaming, maleficent capital, unchecked by conscience or by the roadblocks of the state.
yarb commented on the word maleficent
He had an almost physical sense of struggling for air, of battling helplessly with material obstructions, as though the russet covert through which he trudged were the heart of a maleficent jungle...
- Edith Wharton, The Reef
June 19, 2008