pestilential

adj

1. Of or relating to pestilence or plague.

   “1675, John Dryden, The Mistaken Husband, London: J. Magnes and R. Bentley, Act V, p. 63, What do you fear? Why do you shun me thus. […] I am not Pestilential, nor Leaprous.”

   “[…] the Winter keen Pour’d out his Waste of Snows, and Summer shot His pestilential Heats:”

   “The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential.”

   “1941, J. Chapman Miske, “The Thing in the Moonlight” in H. P. Lovecraft, The Tomb and Other Tales, New York: Ballantine, 1970, p. 187, Casting my eyes about, I beheld no living object; but was sensible of a very peculiar stirring far below me, amongst the whispering rushes of the pestilential swamp I had lately quitted.”

2. Of or relating to pestilence or plague.

   “A long sicknesse will weary friends at last; but a pestilentiall sicknes auerts them from the beginning.”

   “[…] the miseries of famine were succeeded and aggravated by the contagion of a pestilential disease.”

3. Of or relating to pestilence or plague.

   “pestilential fever; pestilential sweating”

   “The Scab, the Stench, and the Burning are terrible pestilential Symptoms,”

4. Of or relating to pestilence or plague.

   “Now this pestilentiall Summer being well spent, upon the approach of the Winter, and decrease of the Sicknesse, the King […] drawes nearer to the City of London,”

   “They must expect more Pestilential times, That lives in th’ Equinoctial of their Crimes;”

5. (figuratively)Having a harmful moral effect (especially one that is believed to spread in the manner of pestilence).

   “But as the Poisons of the deadliest kind Are to their own unhappy Coasts confin’d, […] So Presby’try and Pestilential Zeal Can only flourish in a Common-weal.”

   “By proclaiming individuals or entire societies to be damned, by treating their convictions as pestilential heresies, church and state had deliberately loosed fanaticism and savagery on often helpless men.”

6. (figuratively)Causing irritation or annoyance.

   “There’s the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs […] They’d none of ’em be missed!”

   “1899, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 165, March 1899, Chapter 2, p. 480, […] a species of wandering trader—a pestilential fellow, snapping ivory from the natives.”

   ““You are right that Authority must go. It is ridiculous—pestilential, not to be borne—that we should be ruled by an irresponsible dictator in all our essential economy!””

   “these ostensibly pestilential visits from Mumsey”