hilarious
Americanadjective
-
arousing great merriment; extremely funny.
a hilarious story; a hilarious old movie.
-
boisterously merry or cheerful.
a hilarious celebration.
- Synonyms:
- high-spirited, rollicking, jolly, lively
-
merry; cheerful.
adjective
Usage
What does hilarious mean? Hilarious means extremely funny, like literally lol funny.Hilarious is most commonly used to describe someone or something (like a joke or a movie) as super funny. Much less commonly, it used to mean very merry or cheerful, as in a hilarious celebration.Example: The movie was absolutely hilarious—I was laughing so hard at one point that I was crying.
Other Word Forms
- hilariously adverb
- hilariousness noun
- hyperhilarious adjective
- hyperhilariously adverb
- hyperhilariousness noun
- unhilarious adjective
- unhilariously adverb
- unhilariousness noun
Etymology
Origin of hilarious
1815–25; < Latin hilar ( is ), hilar ( us ) cheerful (< Greek hilarós ) + -ious
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.
“Scary Movie” is a genuinely hilarious parody of horror tropes, while its sequels are merely decent clip packages, stitched together by increasingly weak narrative threads.
From Salon
Do they laugh and say: “That’s hilarious—good one”? Or do they scream and run away?
The distraught Bonnie was not, however, the norm for Hawks women, who were notoriously indomitable, clever, resourceful and often hilarious.
Amit Segal’s smart and often hilarious crash course in Israeli political history.
The hilarious essay on Allen Ginsberg describes a fateful night in 1958 that Podhoretz spent arguing with the manic poet himself as Jack Kerouac sat silently by.
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.
