adjective
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horrific or bloodthirsty
a gory story
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involving bloodshed and killing
a gory battle
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covered in gore
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Adjectives
Etymology
Origin of gory
Explanation
Use the word gory to describe something that features a lot of bloodshed and violence, like a horror movie in which victims are axed to death by a madman. Some people love gory movies like that, and others refuse to watch them. Something that is gory often involves both violence and bloodshed, but it can also describe something that is merely blood, like the gory photographs depicting a root canal procedure in a dental assistant textbook. Gory can describe unpleasant, embarrassing things, like saying of your brother’s bad behavior over the holidays, “I’ll spare you the gory details about his meltdown at the family Christmas party.”
Vocabulary lists containing gory
Bud, Not Buddy
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"Macbeth" Vocabulary from Act III
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The Catcher in the Rye
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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:
In Ms. Skuse’s expert and frequently humorous telling, Renaissance medicine comes to life in all its gory and weird splendor.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 6, 2026
Season 1 was surprisingly great — a gory but smart, richly developed retro-futuristic reflection of class conflict — and wound up being one of Prime Video’s most-watched shows ever.
From MarketWatch ● Nov. 30, 2025
Classical music was the extreme music of its time, and proved you don’t need electricity, amplification or even gory lyrics to be heavy.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 3, 2025
But later on Wednesday night, the full extent of those emails were published by Bloomberg, and the prime minister read the exchanges in all their gory glory.
From BBC ● Sep. 13, 2025
It is hard to understand why my vivid imagination and tendency toward scariness didn’t provide me with gory scenes of bloody crashes on a risco de Mexico.
From "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
It's also a brand of true crime that's a little lower stakes — and inherently less problematically salacious — than some of the gorier serial killer stories.
From Salon ● May 9, 2021
And if this is right, the Mesozoic may have been gorier than traditionally depicted.
From Scientific American ● Jul. 15, 2017
Or you could acknowledge that the true impact of the design, with its stainless-steel ribbons draped over a three-story, blood-red box, is even more entertaining and populist than that, if also a little gorier.
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 3, 2015
But as health warnings grow ever bigger and gorier, the companies have been finding other ways to give their products a distinctive look and feel.
From BBC ● Nov. 23, 2014
Kill List Reading the headlines is frightening enough for most people these days, but for those in search of stronger, gorier, sillier permutations of fear, Frightfest is the country's favourite worst nightmare.
From The Guardian ● Aug. 19, 2011
The “Mortal Kombat” series continues to be one of the dumbest, goriest and most vulgar of all big-studio action franchises.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 7, 2026
It was while Lee was at The Baseball Ground that he enjoyed two of the most glorious - and in once case goriest - moments of his career.
From BBC ● Oct. 2, 2023
Less a sequel than a do-over, this supervillain extravaganza is the latest, goriest and flat-out weirdest emission from the DC Extended Universe.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 1, 2021
The goriest sub-classification was “driving, floating” jumpers, on which he was 4 of 24.
From Slate ● Jun. 17, 2021
You and I, Major, start for Mesopotamy tomorrow, and that's about the meanest bit of bad luck that ever happened to John S. We're missing the chance of seeing the goriest fight of this campaign.'
From Greenmantle by Buchan, John
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.
