Meaning of horripilating | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Causing horripilation.
2. Horrendous, horrifying, terrifying.
   figuratively

Examples

“I was sadly shocked, however, when he said he could prove that God hates the truth; the effect was horripilating.”

“Fear, the product of guilt, is a true night-plant. Like some of those gigantic fungi the botanists tell of, it springs up in the dark, and in an hour of restless tossing, sudorific, horripilating wretchedness, canopies our bed with a phantom toad-stool of gigantic size. The load that the conscience can jauntily stagger under in the broad light of day, […] will, in the gloom and silence of the night, wear its bearer to his knees.”

“Always something of a timpani concerto among symphonies—besides the famous solos in the Scherzo there is the horripilating tattoo that all but drowns out the first movement recapitulation, […]”

“In Rachilde's fiction, however, scientists or doctors are associated with sexual knowledge that is both unwelcome and yet empowering, the sort of knowledge that makes a young girl's hair stand on end[…]. This horripilating experience is unwelcome, because it comes in the form of unwanted sexual advances at a time when the heroine is still innocent, but ultimately empowering, because it frees the heroine from any further vulnerability to seduction and gives her power over men.”

“But what could you do about bombs dropped on you from the air? Especially in the dead of night. The idea of being killed in your sleep by an enemy you'd never even seen was horripilating.”

CEFR level