hellhound
Americannoun
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hellhounds
plural
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a mythical watchdog of hell.
-
a fiendish person.
noun
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a hound of hell
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a fiend
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of hellhound
before 900; Middle English, Old English helle hund; see hell, hound 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Cerberus, the guard of the underworld, is featured with Hercules, a reference to the heroic demigod’s 12th and final labor which involved capturing the hellhound.
From Washington Times ● Oct. 10, 2023
Temperatures on the continent soared past 40C, with forecasters calling on Greek Mythology to coin one heatwave Cerberus, a three-headed hellhound that guards the gates of the underworld.
From BBC ● Sep. 1, 2023
I knew that what I did as a 16-year-old in Virginia would forever be a hellhound on my trail, but I hoped that I had outpaced my scapegrace.
From New York Times ● Oct. 16, 2018
Plugged into a high-wattage amplifier, it produces the sound of the mythical hellhound on proto-bluesman Robert Johnson's trail.
From Seattle Times ● Apr. 2, 2011
My hellhound leaped over a line of centaurs and gave me a kiss that smelled suspiciously of pepperoni pizza.
From "The Last Olympian" by Rick Riordan
Wilson describes Herald in detail in the script: “A man driven not by the hellhounds that seemingly bay at his heels, but by his search for a world that speaks to something about himself.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 26, 2026
We get no sense of the man’s haunted determination—no hints of those hellhounds.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 26, 2026
For the Greeks, the Black Sea was the edge of the known world, inhabited by, as he writes in the book, “cannibals, hellhounds, man-slaughtering Amazons, dwarves mounted on flying cranes, Cyclopes, lice-eaters, and werewolves.”
From Washington Post ● Jul. 29, 2022
In the first couple hours of Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara I fought and killed goblins, skeletons, gnolls, kobolds, displacer beasts, hellhounds, and a manticore, among myriad other classic D&D beasties.
From Forbes ● Jun. 21, 2013
Jason, Piper, and Nico stood on the near side of the chasm, which was good, but they were surrounded by a ring of Cyclopes and hellhounds.
From "The House of Hades" by Rick Riordan
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
