hilarious
- 1
- 2Full of boisterous cheer and high spirits; merry and given to laughter.
When the last exam ended, the students spilled into the street hilarious with relief, laughing and shouting at nothing in particular.
Two glasses of champagne had put the groom in a hilarious mood, and he hugged every guest who came near him.
Similarmerry, jolly, jovial, boisterous, giddy
Oppositesomber, gloomy, glum, subdued
Note
The inward sense, and the one nearest Latin hilaris, "cheerful": it describes how someone feels, not what they make others feel. Le Fanu's "blustering, hilarious Doctor Rogerson" (1863) is loud with good spirits, and Douglas Stewart's man rounding up cows in 1944 "felt hilarious, light-headed." Because the word also carries the "very funny" meaning, signal this one with a mood frame: felt hilarious, in a hilarious mood.
Use it in a sentence
Write your own sentence with hilarious, and AI will tell you whether it fits and which meaning you used.
Origin
A learned borrowing from Latin hilaris ('cheerful') combined with the suffix '-ous'. The Latin word itself came from Ancient Greek hilarós, meaning 'cheerful' or 'merry'.