Acherontic

• acherontic
• acherontical (obsolete)

Acherontic

1. Of, pertaining to or resembling Acheron (one of the rivers located in the underworld according to ancient Greek mythology).

   Coordinate terms: Cocytean, Lethean, Phlegethontic, Stygian

   • 1607, Thomas Dekker, chapter 4, in A Knights Conjuring‎, London: William Barley:

     It was a Comedy, to see what a crowding (as if it had bene at a newe Play,) there was vpon the Acheronticque Strond,

   • 1726, anonymous author, The British Apollo‎, 3rd edition, London: Theodore Sanders, page 106:

     Fierce earthquakes tear the world, the heavens bow,
     A passage opens to the shades below:
     From acherontick shores black fiends ascend,

   • 1867, Thomas Carlyle, chapter 10, in Shooting Niagara: and After?‎, London: Chapman and Hall, page 53:

     Is Free Industry free to convert all our rivers into Acherontic sewers; England generally into a roaring sooty smith’s forge?

   • 1987, Paul Breslin, chapter 8, in The Psycho-Political Muse‎, University of Chicago Press, page 179:

     Although Wright’s underwater man in Venice may remind us of the ghosts of the drowned in the Ohio River, this Italian fantasy is more benign; the canal is not like the Acherontic Ohio […]

2. (figurative) Of or pertaining to hell.

   Synonyms: hellish, infernal, Plutonian, Tartarean

   • 1623, George Langford, Search the Scriptures, London: John Clarke, Section 7, p. 43,

     How did those Aegyptians storme, when Moses and Aaron, Crumwell and Cranmer came, to deliuer Gods Israel, from that Acheronticall ignorance?

   • 1638, Thomas Herbert, Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia and Afrique‎, London: Jacob Blome and Richard Bishop, page 17:

     Both sex, hideously cut, and gash, and pink in sundry works, their browes, nose, cheeks, armes, brest, back, belly, thighes and legges in Acherontick order: in a word, are so deformed, that if they had studied to become antick, they might be praised for invention.

   • 1895, Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure‎, New York: Harper, published 1896, Part 6, Chapter 4, p. 428:

     […] they proceeded through the fog like Acherontic shades for a long while, without sound or gesture.

3. (figurative) Lacking joy and comfort[1]; nearing death.

   Synonyms: bleak, cheerless, dismal, gloomy, lugubrious, moribund

   • 1599, John Weever, Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion, London: Thomas Bushell, The Thirde Weeke, Epig. 7,

     Depart to blacke nights Acheronticke Cell,

   • 1621, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford: Henry Cripps, Part 3, Section 3, Member 4, Subsection 2, p. 701,

     […] it is most odious, when an old Acheronticke dizard, that hath one foote in his graue, shall flicker after a young wench, what can be more detestable.

   • 1860, Walter Thornbury, chapter 9, in Turkish Life and Character,‎, volume 1, London: Smith, Elder, page 213:

     I see no owls, though I am told that at night they fill these Acherontic woods with demon hooting […]

   • 1947, Frank Waters, chapter 10, in The Yogi of Cockroach Court‎, Chicago: Sage Books, published 1972, page 225:

     It was twilight in the streets. On every corner glowed lights from doors and dusty windows. Acherontic figures lounged by lazily or sat against the walls.

   • 2001, Timothy West, chapter 22, in A Moment Towards the End of the Play…‎, London: Nick Hern Books, page 176:

     In Manchester, our designer Roy Stonehouse had built the dark lanes of his [Dickens’] Acherontic township on the low-lying land behind Water Street […]

• anchoretic