brimstone
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
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English [edit]
Etymology [edit]
From Middle English brimston, bremston, corrupted forms of brinston, brenston, bernston, from Old English brynstān (“brimstone”, literally “burn-stone”), equivalent to brian + stone, or burn + stone. Cognate with Scots brunstane (“brimstone”), Icelandic brennisteinn (“sulfur, brimstone”), German Bernstein (“amber”). Compare also brimfire. More at burn, stone.
Once a synonym for "sulphur," the word is now restricted to Biblical usage.
Adjective [edit]
brimstone
- Composed of or resembling brimstone; about or pertaining to Hell.
- '[W]ho walked up Aldersgate-street to some chapel where she comforts herself with brimstone doctrine.' — Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller
- '[A] cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around him.' — Thomas Hardy Tess of the d'Urbevilles
- '[...] he gave vent to a succession of sounds, not unlike the drawing of some eight or ten dozen of long corks, and again asserted his brimstone birth and parentage with great distinctness.' — Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge
- 'I wish your brimstone grandmother was here, and he'd shave her head off.' — Charles Dickens, Bleak House
- 'From his brimstone bed at break of day / A walking the Devil is gone.' — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Noun [edit]
brimstone (countable and uncountable; plural brimstones)
- Sulphur.
- The sulphur of Hell; Hell, damnation.
- (archaic) Used attributively as an intensifier in exclamations.
- 'You are a brimstone pig. You're a head of swine!' — Charles Dickens, Bleak House
- 'You're a brimstone idiot.' — Charles Dickens, Bleak House
- The butterfly Gonepteryx rhamni of the Pieridae family.
Translations [edit]
sulphur
butterfly species
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Quotations [edit]
- 'Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.' — Genesis, 19:24, King James Version
- 'And I will plead against him with pestilence and with blood; and I will rain upon him, and upon his bands, and upon the many people that {are} with him, an overflowing rain, and great hailstones, fire, and brimstone.' — Ezekiel, 38:22 King James Version
- 'For griefe thereof, and diuelish despight, / From his infernall fournace forth he threw / Huge flames, that dimmed all the heauens light, / Enrold in duskish smoke and brimstone blew.' — Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene
- 'Till, as a signal giv'n, th' uplifted Spear / Of their great Sultan waving to direct / Thir course, in even ballance down they light / On the firm brimstone, and fill all the Plain; / A multitude.' — John Milton, Paradise Lost
- 'Weel I wot I wad be broken if I were to gie sic weight to the folk that come to buy our pepper and brimstone, and suchlike sweetmeats.' — Walter Scott, The Antiquary
- '[W]hen he [the Devil] is aweary of vice, and aweary of virtue, used up as to brimstone, and used up as to bliss [...]' — Charles Dickens,Hard Times
- 'Don't think, young man, that we go to the expense of flower of brimstone and molasses, just to purify them.' — Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
- 'The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench.' — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- 'But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury.' — James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
