hellhound
Americannoun
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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
But then a hellhound leaped on him, and Tyson and the hound went rolling away.
From "The Battle of the Labyrinth" 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
In the process, these siblings come to embody a more harmonic vision for the country, a big two-hearted slipstream that may yet carry us away from “the hellhounds on the trail.”
From Washington Post ● Feb. 6, 2017
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
Although I zoned out for most of Dad’s hour-long lecture, I do remember that Giants’ hair is one of the few things that hellhounds can’t chew through.
From "The Manifestor Prophecy" by Angie Thomas
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.
