hellscape
noun
hell·scape
ˈhel-ˌskāp 
plural hellscapes
: a hellish landscape : a harshly unpleasant place or environment
I blame growing up in Southern California—this did not prepare me for real winter, much less the frigid hellscape that is New York in January.—
Aliza Arbabanel
Aliza ArbabanelMeanwhile, it's heartbreaking to see Route 33, once called out by Jalopnik as "America's greatest driving road," reduced to this horrifying hellscape. And, of course, to think about all the nearby people and animals and communities being inundated with fire and smoke.—Andrew P. Collins
Andrew P. CollinsExamples of hellscape in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
The high point of Mickey 17, Bong Joon-ho’s bitterly funny follow-up to his Oscar-winning Parasite, is a prolonged sequence in which the title character, a hapless schlub played by Robert Pattinson, explains how his life became a hellscape of technologically enabled immortality.
—Alison Willmore, Vulture, 15 Feb. 2025
Looking like the cross between a spermatozoon and a tadpole, this needy, frail little infant is wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes, resting on the dresser and then the drawer of poor Jack Nance’s apartment in an industrial hellscape.
—Christian Blauvelt, IndieWire, 16 Jan. 2025
By late afternoon that day, the Palisades had turned into an unimaginable hellscape.
—Cynthia Littleton, Variety, 13 Jan. 2025
Two hundred years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.
—Nellie Andreeva, Deadline, 7 Jan. 2025
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Alison Willmore, Vulture, 15 Feb. 2025
Looking like the cross between a spermatozoon and a tadpole, this needy, frail little infant is wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes, resting on the dresser and then the drawer of poor Jack Nance’s apartment in an industrial hellscape.
—Christian Blauvelt, IndieWire, 16 Jan. 2025
By late afternoon that day, the Palisades had turned into an unimaginable hellscape.
—Cynthia Littleton, Variety, 13 Jan. 2025
Two hundred years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them.
—Nellie Andreeva, Deadline, 7 Jan. 2025
See All Example Sentences for hellscape
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Cite this Entry
“Hellscape.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hellscape. Accessed 15 Mar. 2025.
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