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PERNICIOUS
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Dictionary entry overview: What does pernicious mean?
• PERNICIOUS (adjective)
The adjective PERNICIOUS has 2 senses:
1. exceedingly harmful
2. working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way
Familiarity information: PERNICIOUS used as an adjective is rare.
Dictionary entry details
Sense 1
Meaning:
Exceedingly harmful
Synonyms:
baneful; deadly; pernicious; pestilent
Similar:
noxious (injurious to physical or mental health)
Derivation:
perniciousness (grave harmfulness or deadliness)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way
Synonyms:
Context example:
a subtle poison
Similar:
harmful (causing or capable of causing harm)
Derivation:
perniciousness (grave harmfulness or deadliness)
Context examples
It may save them from foolish and pernicious babbling.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Vitamin B12 deficiency causes pernicious anemia, megaloblastic anemia, and neurologic lesions.
(Cyanocobalamin, NCI Thesaurus)
But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
That, perhaps, in short, this Prerogative Office of the diocese of Canterbury was altogether such a pestilent job, and such a pernicious absurdity, that but for its being squeezed away in a corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, which few people knew, it must have been turned completely inside out, and upside down, long ago.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
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