nightmarish

comparative more nightmarish · superlative most nightmarish

1. Resembling a nightmare.

   Meanwhile, the everyday landscape becomes more nightmarish and unmanageable each year.

   1994, James Howard Kunstler, The geography of nowhere: the rise and decline of America's man-made landscape, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 10

   4 more examples

   The dragon from under-earth, the nightmarish destroyer, lay destroyed as well, utterly without life.

   1999, Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, London: Faber and Faber, page 89

   He has been to Italy during the Allied advance, where he covered nightmarish scenes in Naples.

   2017, Marina Budhos and Marc Aronson, Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro & The Invention of Modern Photojournalism, page 2

   Nineteen Eighty-Four was written in 1949. Its nightmarish fictional world is now 37 years in the past, so one might reasonably conclude that Orwell was far too pessimistic, but his great book was less a prediction than a warning, and above all an analysis of the totalitarian mentality.

   2021 January 5, Peter Foster, “Peter Foster: Sustainable Newspeak by 2050”, in Financial Post

   People sometimes find the idea of buying and selling human bones nightmarish, but Ferry told The Washington Post he doesn’t think of it that way. He says he admires and respects the structure of bones.

   2021 October 10, Caroline Anders, “A TikTok bone salesman’s wall of spines reignites ethical debate over selling human remains”, in The Washington Post, archived from the original on 17 Oct 2021

   Synonyms: nightmary, nightmarelike, nightmarious