hellscape

noun

hell·​scape ˈhel-ˌskāp How to pronounce hellscape (audio)
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
Meanwhile, 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

Examples of hellscape in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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 See All Example Sentences for hellscape

Word History

First Known Use

1894, in the meaning defined above

Time Traveler
The first known use of hellscape was in 1894

Rhymes for hellscape

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hellscape
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Cite this Entry

“Hellscape.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hellscape. Accessed 20 Mar. 2025.

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