hellscape

noun

hell·​scape ˈhel-ˌskāp 

plural hellscapes

: a hellish landscape : a harshly unpleasant place or environment

I blame growing up in Southern California—this did not prepare me for real winter, much less the frigid hellscape that is New York in January.

—Aliza Arbabanel

Meanwhile, it's heartbreaking to see Route 33, once called out by Jalopnik as "America's greatest driving road," reduced to this horrifying hellscape. And, of course, to think about all the nearby people and animals and communities being inundated with fire and smoke.

—Andrew P. Collins

Examples of hellscape in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Looking like the cross between a spermatozoon and a tadpole, this needy, frail little infant is wrapped tightly in swaddling clothes, resting on the dresser and then the drawer of poor Jack Nance’s apartment in an industrial hellscape. —Christian Blauvelt, IndieWire, 16 Jan. 2025

By late afternoon that day, the Palisades had turned into an unimaginable hellscape. —Cynthia Littleton, Variety, 13 Jan. 2025

Two hundred years after the apocalypse, the gentle denizens of luxury fallout shelters are forced to return to the irradiated hellscape their ancestors left behind — and are shocked to discover an incredibly complex, gleefully weird and highly violent universe waiting for them. —Nellie Andreeva, Deadline, 7 Jan. 2025

Analysis: Trump refers to the U.S. as ravaged by crisis, calling it a desolate hellscape of crime, chaos and economic hardship. —Natasha Frost, New York Times, 6 Jan. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1894, in the meaning defined above