Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Tending to cause death or serious injury; deadly: a pernicious virus.
- adj. Causing great harm; destructive: pernicious rumors.
- adj. Archaic Evil; wicked.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Having the property of destroying or being injurious; hurtful; destructive.
- Wicked; malicious; evil-hearted.
- Quick.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Quick; swift (to burn).
- adj. Having the quality of injuring or killing; destructive; very mischievous; baleful; malicious; wicked.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. exceedingly harmful
- adj. working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way
Etymologies
- Middle English, from Old French pernicios, from Latin perniciōsus, from perniciēs, destruction : per-, per- + nex, nec-, violent death; see nek-1 in Indo-European roots.
Examples
“It is time to undertake the reform of what I call a pernicious prejudice.”
“My eyes overflow, my dear Pauline; and Maitland will chide me for indulging what he calls a pernicious sensibility.”
“It skews consumption and investment in pernicious ways.”
Matthew Yglesias » The High Cost of Subsidized Homeownership
“Progressives are too eager to believe that national health care will make it possible to expand coverage while reducing costs — reducing deficits, even! — apparently because all those costs are in pernicious “overhead,” which seems to be joining that political holy trinity “waste, fraud, and abuse.””
“Presumably, what makes political networks so pernicious is not their personal sex life, but the very real damage they do to their states in the form of myopic and self-aggrandizing lawmaking, incompetent appointees, and a perversion of our democratic institutions.”
“The most pernicious is Proposition 25, which is being sold as a good government measure to end the state's annual fiscal follies and pass a budget on time.”
“Lane suggests that idea of dramatizing this tale — “a low-grade musing on atrocity, garnished with erotic titillation” — was “pernicious from the start.””
“Yet more pernicious is the result when that worldview is encoded, unquestioned, systemic.”
“The ingroup-outgroup distinction has the power to distort and bias our attitudes towards outgroup members in pernicious ways.”
“A reticulocyte response does not necessarily mean that specific material which the body lacks has been supplied, for there are other substances and conditions that cause reticulocytosis in pernicious anemia, which do not regularly promote normal blood formation.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘pernicious’.
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GRE Barrons Wordlist
A complete Barron's Wordlist for GRE preparation. Your online flashcard replacement.
abase, abash, abate, abbreviate, abdicate, aberrant, aberration, abet, abeyance, abhor, abject, abjure and 4084 more...
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People are Scum
words that one may enjoy using to describe other people or their actions
degenerate, reprobate, scapegrace, capricious, sycophant, arbitrary, infernal, abominable, iniquitous, nefarious, philistine, sadistic and 30 more...
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Rexicon
brazen, insipid, cuss, penchant, salacious, titillate, lurid, schlemiel, interlope, masquerade, supercilious, action-taking and 51 more...
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fav1
ostensibly, fait accompli, edification, machination, vamp, abstruse, ebullient, tantamount, reductio, asymptotic, ad hominem, syllogism and 7 more...
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phil vocab 3
genocide, superfluous, warfare, indissoluble, sentient, confound, pernicious, dispose, render, amiable, paradox, puritanical and 36 more...
mollusque I thought Knids were vermicious. Oct 5, 2009
meeralee Then perhaps I should remove it. :-) Thanks, slumry! Jul 23, 2007
slumry "working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way" In this sense, I think it does have the connotation of insidiousness. Jul 10, 2007
seanahan Used to describe Knids. Feb 28, 2007
meeralee On this list because I always think it has the connotation of insidiousness, which it doesn't really. Feb 28, 2007