Library / English Dictionary

LOATHE

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (verb) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Find repugnant

Example:

She abhors cats

Synonyms:

abhor; abominate; execrate; loathe

Classified under:

Verbs of feeling

Hypernyms (to "loathe" is one way to...):

detest; hate (dislike intensely; feel antipathy or aversion towards)

Sentence frames:

Somebody ----s something
Somebody ----s somebody

Sentence examples:

Sam cannot loathe Sue

They loathe moving

Sam and Sue loathe the movie

Derivation:

loather (one who hates or loathes)

loathing (hate coupled with disgust)

Credits

 Context examples: 

He brought out of the Yahoos’ kennel a piece of ass’s flesh; but it smelt so offensively that I turned from it with loathing: he then threw it to the Yahoo, by whom it was greedily devoured.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

A man cannot be condemned for a murder at which he was not present, and which he loathes and abhors as much as you do.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight.

(Dracula, by Bram Stoker)

"He says so, and he ought to know," was the answer, with a wave aside of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing.

(Martin Eden, by Jack London)

It was a deep, aggressive loathing of which you may even now form some conception if you examine the papers or caricatures of the day.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I turned with loathing from the woman who could utter so unfeeling a speech to a person just saved, on the very edge of death; but I felt languid and unable to reflect on all that had passed.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

His terror of the gallows drove him continually to commit temporary suicide, and return to his subordinate station of a part instead of a person; but he loathed the necessity, he loathed the despondency into which Jekyll was now fallen, and he resented the dislike with which he was himself regarded.

(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Their next business is from herbs, minerals, gums, oils, shells, salts, juices, sea-weed, excrements, barks of trees, serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men’s flesh and bones, birds, beasts, and fishes, to form a composition, for smell and taste, the most abominable, nauseous, and detestable, they can possibly contrive, which the stomach immediately rejects with loathing, and this they call a vomit; or else, from the same store-house, with some other poisonous additions, they command us to take in at the orifice above or below (just as the physician then happens to be disposed) a medicine equally annoying and disgustful to the bowels; which, relaxing the belly, drives down all before it; and this they call a purge, or a clyster.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

I loathe and fear him more than I can say.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)