Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Having or exerting a malignant influence.
  • adjective Malicious or harmful.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Doing mischief; producing disaster or evil; inauspicious.
  • noun In astrology, an inauspicious star or planet.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective rare Doing mischief; causing harm or evil; nefarious; hurtful.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective having or exerting a malignant influence

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin maleficus : male, ill; see mel- in Indo-European roots + -ficus, -fic.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin maleficus.

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Examples

  • "malefic" -- he would hate their gravity and purity, and feel for them that raging envy which is the tribute that virtue receives from vice.

    The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 Rossiter Johnson 1906

  • Mars is in this instance considered a 'malefic' trigger for the larger configuration of slower planets.

    WHAT REALLY HAPPENED 2010

  • King, "and Saturn, the angel of the church of Philadelphia, are astrologically known as malefic planets.

    The Woman's Bible Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1858

  • More than a building, though not quite a personage in the novel, the mosque functions more as if it is an implacable yet silent deity imparting sentences on lives sometimes benefic, at other times malefic, but always of life-determining circumstance.

    G. Roger Denson: The Beauty We Fear: The Mosques of Secular Muslim Writers G. Roger Denson 2010

  • More than a building, though not quite a personage in the novel, the mosque functions more as if it is an implacable yet silent deity imparting sentences on lives sometimes benefic, at other times malefic, but always of life-determining circumstance.

    G. Roger Denson: The Beauty We Fear: The Mosques of Secular Muslim Writers G. Roger Denson 2010

  • More than a building, though not quite a personage in the novel, the mosque functions more as if it is an implacable yet silent deity imparting sentences on lives sometimes benefic, at other times malefic, but always of life-determining circumstance.

    G. Roger Denson: The Beauty We Fear: The Mosques of Secular Muslim Writers G. Roger Denson 2010

  • More than a building, though not quite a personage in the novel, the mosque functions more as if it is an implacable yet silent deity imparting sentences on lives sometimes benefic, at other times malefic, but always of life-determining circumstance.

    G. Roger Denson: The Beauty We Fear: The Mosques of Secular Muslim Writers G. Roger Denson 2010

  • More than a building, though not quite a personage in the novel, the mosque functions more as if it is an implacable yet silent deity imparting sentences on lives sometimes benefic, at other times malefic, but always of life-determining circumstance.

    G. Roger Denson: The Beauty We Fear: The Mosques of Secular Muslim Writers G. Roger Denson 2010

  • I, for one, miss Matt, and wonder who has taken him, and to what malefic purpose.

    Matthew Yglesias » CFPA in the Fed? 2010

  • The pharisaical, malefic, and incogitant Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing is a product of the pointy-headed wowsers at the Association of American University Presses who established a Task Force on Bias-Free Language filled with cranks, pokenoses, blowhards, four-flushers, and pettifogs.

    P.J. O’Wowser superversive 2009

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