Word of the Day

: January 13, 2013

Abhor

verb ub-HOR

What It Means

: to regard with extreme repugnance : loathe

Abhor in Context

She is a strict vegetarian who abhors the consumption of meat.

"In fairness, Darwin mostly refrained from extrapolating natural selection to human society. And he abhorred slavery at a time when many justified it as the natural order of things." - From an article by Shankar Vedantam in The Washington Post, February 5, 2006

Did You Know?

"Abhor" implies strong feelings of repugnance, disgust, and aversion. This degree of distaste is seen in the word's history. In earlier use, "abhor" sometimes implied an actual shrinking away from something in horror or repugnance. Appropriately, the word's Latin source, the verb "abhorrēre," comes from the prefix "ab-" ("from, away") and the verb "horrēre" ("to shudder"). As you may have guessed, Latin "horrēre" is also the source of the English words "horror," "horrify," and "horrible."