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
In Aduba’s hilarious and scalding performance, Clyde, wearing a succession of skintight don’t-mess-with-me outfits by Jennifer Moeller, is a shape-shifting hellhound, all but breathing fire.
From New York Times ● Nov. 23, 2021
Beneath it, one sharp-fanged, evil-looking hellhound opens its jaws.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 20, 2020
For two weeks, I’m only allowed outside to take Cocoa to handle her business, which basically means I’m only allowed to pick up hellhound poop.
From "The Manifestor Prophecy" by Angie Thomas
We get no sense of the man’s haunted determination—no hints of those hellhounds.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 26, 2026
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
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
The wizards toss me, Alex, and the hellhounds into a small, windowless office.
From "The Manifestor Prophecy" by Angie Thomas
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Get a wordDefinitions 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.
