English edit

Etymology edit

From hell +‎ -scape.

Pronunciation edit

Noun edit

hellscape (plural hellscapes)

  1. A hellish landscape.
    a Dantesque hellscape
    • 1990, Stephen King, “The Langoliers”, in Four Past Midnight:
      As they crossed the Western Slope toward Utah, the dark began to come down again. The setting sun threw an orange-red glare over a fragmented hellscape that none of them could look at for long; one by one, they followed Bethany's example and pulled their windowshades.
    • 2009 September 7, Janet Maslin, “News at Styx: Who’s Hot in Hades”, in New York Times[1]:
      Mr. Butler, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,” treats his newest novelistic conceit as an occasion to toss every possible ingredient into a fanciful hellscape and then let these elements run wild.
  2. (figurative) An exceptionally unpleasant, disagreeable, or harsh place or thing.
    • 2015 August 14, Chris Eggertsen, “Miley Cyrus just got really honest about the hellscape that was 'Hannah Montana'”, in HitFix[2]:
      Miley Cyrus just got really honest about the hellscape that was "Hannah Montana"
    • 2021 February 2, Katharine Murphy, “Scott Morrison must heed the lesson of Donald Trump and slap down Craig Kelly”, in The Guardian[3]:
      Avoiding a cacophony is a worthy objective, because Australia has managed to largely sidestep the post-truth hellscape the US has endured during the pandemic because politicians, by and large, have chosen to inhabit a universe of shared facts and common messages.
    • 2022 October 27, Lauren Hirsch, quoting Elon Musk, “Elon Musk Reaches Out to Advertisers Ahead of Deadline for Twitter Deal”, in The New York Times[4], →ISSN:
      But, he added, “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences!”

Further reading edit