parlous
Adjective Satellite
- fraught with danger
- "a parlous journey on stormy seas"
Adj
- Attended with peril; dangerous, risky.
- Appalling, dire, terrible.
- Dangerously clever or cunning; also, remarkably good or unusual.
Adv
- Extremely, very.
Examples
- "in a parlous state"
- "The situation became parlous when the weather made resupply impossible."
Origin / Etymology
From Middle English parles, parlous, perlous, [and other forms], a contraction of perilous (“dangerous; dreadful, terrible; morally corrupt, sinful, wicked; inauspicious, unlucky”) (and thus a doublet of perilous), from Old French perilleus, perillos, perillous, perilluse, perilleuse, perilleux (“very dangerous, perilous”) (modern French périlleux), from Latin perīculōsus (“dangerous, hazardous, perilous”), from perīculum (“danger, hazard, peril, risk”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *per- (“to go through, carry forth, try”)) + -ōsus (suffix meaning ‘full of, prone to’ forming adjectives).
Synonyms
dangerous, dangersome, hazardous, jeopardous, parlous, periculous, perilous, precarious, risky, touch-and-go, unsafe
Scrabble Score: 9
parlous is a valid Scrabble (US) TWL wordparlous is a valid Scrabble Word in Merriam-Webster MW Dictionary
parlous is a valid Scrabble Word in International Collins CSW Dictionary