subs. (colloquial).—Anybody or anything grievously below the ordinary standard or out of the common: e.g., a bad blunder, a flagrant violator of good taste, a very weak pun, etc. Hence ATROCIOUS, adj. = shockingly bad, execrable, and as adv. = excessively.
1831. ALFORD [Life (1873), 67]. The letter had an ATROCIOUSLY long sentence in it.
1878. HATTON, Correspondence, Preface, iv. Their diction and their spelling, and the fearful ATROCITIES committed in the latter.
