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:
Rather than recapitulate historical chronicles, Mr. Enrigue imagines the event from the Aztec point of view, creating an account that is gory, hallucinatory and thrilling in its strangeness.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 5, 2026
And while we’ve never really had the full gory details and what that’s entailed, it’s obviously been a subject of informed speculation.
From Slate ● Feb. 4, 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
The immersive “Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow” exhibit featured augmented reality experiences that let visitors use smartphones to bring new “life” to the vibrant, gory, goofy and grand pieces surrounding them.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 18, 2025
The students knew, without seeing gory pictures, what the dangers of tetanus were, and what they ought to be doing.
From "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell
A gorier Cyclops, a darker Circe, an entirely new ending: The writer-director felt free to reshape the 2,700-year-old epic poem for the Imax age.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 23, 2026
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
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
The goriest sub-classification was “driving, floating” jumpers, on which he was 4 of 24.
From Slate ● Jun. 17, 2021
In honor of Halloween, the masked actors of Rogue Ensemble Theater Company will stage an outdoor, socially distanced production of “Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare’s goriest tragedy, on the mausoleum’s grounds in Riverside Park.
From New York Times ● Oct. 29, 2020
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 John Buchan
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.
