# atrocity

Pronunciation: say "uh-TROS-i-tee" /əˈtɹɒsɪti/

## Noun

1. An act involving extreme cruelty or appalling injustice.
   - Simple: A very cruel and terrible act, such as hurting or killing innocent people.
   - _The massacre was an atrocity that shocked the international community._
   - _Investigators spent years documenting atrocities committed during the civil war._
2. The quality of being shockingly wicked, cruel, or criminal to an extreme degree.
   - Simple: The state of being very cruel and evil.
   - _The full atrocity of the regime's methods emerged only after its collapse._
   - _Witnesses struggled to convey the sheer atrocity of what they had seen._
3. A thing judged to be extremely ugly or highly undesirable.
   - Simple: Something that people think is very ugly or unpleasant to look at.
   - _The new parking garage is a concrete atrocity that ruins the view of the harbor._
   - _Critics dismissed the sculpture as an atrocity of glass and twisted steel._

## Origin

From Middle French atrocité, from Latin atrōcitātem, based on atrox ("terrible, cruel"), which itself derives from āter ("matte black").

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/atrocity (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).