acherontic

1. alternativeAlternative form of Acherontic.

alternative acherontic · alternative acherontical

1. Of, pertaining to or resembling Acheron (one of the rivers located in the underworld according to ancient Greek mythology).

   It was a Comedy, to see what a crowding (as if it had bene at a newe Play,) there was vpon the Acheronticque Strond,

   1607, Thomas Dekker, chapter 4, in A Knights Conjuring, London: William Barley

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   Fierce earthquakes tear the world, the heavens bow, A passage opens to the shades below: From acherontick shores black fiends ascend,

   1726, anonymous author, The British Apollo, 3rd edition, London: Theodore Sanders, page 106

   Is Free Industry free to convert all our rivers into Acherontic sewers; England generally into a roaring sooty smith’s forge?

   1867, Thomas Carlyle, chapter 10, in Shooting Niagara: and After?, London: Chapman and Hall, page 53

   Although Wright’s underwater man in Venice may remind us of the ghosts of the drowned in the Ohio River, this Italian fantasy is more benign; the canal is not like the Acherontic Ohio […]

   1987, Paul Breslin, chapter 8, in The Psycho-Political Muse, University of Chicago Press, page 179

2. figurativelyOf or pertaining to hell.

   1623, George Langford, Search the Scriptures, London: John Clarke, Section 7, p. 43, How did those Aegyptians storme, when Moses and Aaron, Crumwell and Cranmer came, to deliuer Gods Israel, from that Acheronticall ignorance?

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   Both sex, hideously cut, and gash, and pink in sundry works, their browes, nose, cheeks, armes, brest, back, belly, thighes and legges in Acherontick order: in a word, are so deformed, that if they had studied to become antick, they might be praised for invention.

   1638, Thomas Herbert, Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia and Afrique, London: Jacob Blome and Richard Bishop, page 17

   […] they proceeded through the fog like Acherontic shades for a long while, without sound or gesture.

   1895, Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, New York: Harper, published 1896, Part 6, Chapter 4, p. 428

   Synonyms: hellish, infernal, Plutonian, Tartarean, infernal, Hadean, hellish, helly

3. figurativelyLacking joy and comfort; nearing death.

   1599, John Weever, Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion, London: Thomas Bushell, The Thirde Weeke, Epig. 7, Depart to blacke nights Acheronticke Cell,

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   1621, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: Henry Cripps, Part 3, Section 3, Member 4, Subsection 2, p. 701, […] it is most odious, when an old Acheronticke dizard, that hath one foote in his graue, shall flicker after a young wench, what can be more detestable.

   I see no owls, though I am told that at night they fill these Acherontic woods with demon hooting […]

   1860, Walter Thornbury, chapter 9, in Turkish Life and Character,, volume 1, London: Smith, Elder, page 213

   It was twilight in the streets. On every corner glowed lights from doors and dusty windows. Acherontic figures lounged by lazily or sat against the walls.

   1947, Frank Waters, chapter 10, in The Yogi of Cockroach Court, Chicago: Sage Books, published 1972, page 225

   In Manchester, our designer Roy Stonehouse had built the dark lanes of his [Dickens’] Acherontic township on the low-lying land behind Water Street […]

   2001, Timothy West, chapter 22, in A Moment Towards the End of the Play…, London: Nick Hern Books, page 176

   Synonyms: bleak, cheerless, dismal, gloomy, lugubrious, moribund