brimstone

English

Etymology

From (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Middle English (deprecated template usage) brimston, (deprecated template usage) bremston, corrupted forms of (deprecated template usage) brinston, (deprecated template usage) brenston, (deprecated template usage) bernston, from (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Old English (deprecated template usage) brynstān (literally “burn-stone”), equivalent to , or . Cognate with (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Scots (deprecated template usage) brunstane, (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Icelandic (deprecated template usage) brennisteinn, (deprecated template usage) [etyl] German (deprecated template usage) Bernstein. Compare also Template:l/en. More at Template:l/en, Template:l/en.

Once a synonym for "sulphur," the word is now restricted to Biblical usage.

Adjective

brimstone

1. 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

brimstone (countable and uncountable, plural brimstones)

1. Sulphur.
2. The sulphur of Hell; Hell, damnation.
3. (deprecated template usage) (archaic) Used attributively as an intensifier in exclamations.
   • 1852–3, Charles Dickens, Bleak House

     You are a brimstone pig. You're a head of swine!

   • 1852–3, Charles Dickens, Bleak House

     You're a brimstone idiot.

Translations

sulphur

• Bulgarian: сяра (bg) f (sjara)
• Catalan: sofre m
• Danish: svovl
• Dutch: zwavel (nl) m
• Finnish: rikki (fi)
• French: soufre (fr) m
• German: Schwefel (de) m
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Hungarian: kénkő (hu)
• Italian: zolfo (it) m
• Old Prussian: sweppils
• Polish: siarka (pl) f
• Russian: сера (ru) f (séra)
• Swedish: svavel (sv)

the sulphur of Hell

• Finnish: tulikivi (fi)
• Old Prussian: sweppils
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Swedish: svavel (sv)

butterfly species

• Danish: citronsommerfugl
• Finnish: sitruunaperhonen
• German: Zitronenfalter m
• Korean: 멧노랑나비 (metnorangnabi)
• Latvian: citrontauriņš m, krūkļu baltenis m
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• Lithuanian: citrinukas (lt) m
• Russian: лимо́нница (ru) f (limónnica), лимо́нница f (krušínnica)
• Swedish: citronfjäril (sv)

Quotations

• '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

Derived terms

• fire and brimstone