Library / English Dictionary

NOXIOUS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (adjective) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

Injurious to physical or mental health

Example:

noxious ideas

Classified under:

Adjectives

Similar:

baneful; deadly; pernicious; pestilent (exceedingly harmful)

corrupting; degrading (harmful to the mind or morals)

vesicant; vesicatory (causing blisters)

Also:

harmful (causing or capable of causing harm)

toxic (of or relating to or caused by a toxin or poison)

unwholesome (detrimental to physical or moral well-being)

Antonym:

innocuous (not injurious to physical or mental health)

Derivation:

noxiousness (the quality of being noxious)

Credits

 Context examples: 

But when the disease was more stubborn and violent, he let in the muzzle while the bellows were full of wind, which he discharged into the body of the patient; then withdrew the instrument to replenish it, clapping his thumb strongly against the orifice of then fundament; and this being repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it, (like water put into a pump), and the patient recovered.

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

They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that could not sympathise with one amongst them; a heterogeneous thing, opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities; a useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to their pleasure; a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

It was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind unacquainted with the world glimpses of its scenes and ways (I do not mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such as derived their interest from the great scale on which they were acted, the strange novelty by which they were characterised); and I had a keen delight in receiving the new ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, and following him in thought through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)