/əˈbɒmɪneɪt/
[verb] To feel a very strong hatred or disgust towards something or someone. If you abominate something, you find it completely unacceptable or deeply offensive.
Romans used this word to curse things they wanted the gods to drive away — it literally meant 'get this evil omen off me.'
The word 'abominate' travels to us from Latin, where it began as the verb 'abominari', meaning to regard something as a bad omen, to detest, or to pray that a terrible thing be averted. This Latin verb is built from two pieces: the prefix 'ab-', meaning 'away from', and 'omen', the Latin word for a sign or portent — the very same word that gives us the English 'omen' directly. Put them together and you get a vivid picture: to turn away from an evil sign, to push something sinister out of sight and out of mind.
In ancient Roman religious life, omens were serious business. Priests and augurs studied the flight of birds, the behaviour of animals, and the appearance of the sky to read the will of the gods. If something terrible appeared — a deformed animal, an unexpected eclipse, a strange cry in the night — it was not merely frightening but spiritually contaminating. To 'abominari' something was to formally declare it ill-omened and to invoke divine protection against it. The emotion behind the word was not simple dislike but something closer to sacred dread.
The Latin 'abominari' produced the past participle 'abominatus', and from this form the word spread into later Latin texts and eventually into the languages of medieval Europe. English borrowed 'abominate' directly from Latin in the mid-17th century, though related forms had already arrived earlier by a different route. The word 'abominable' entered English in the 14th century, passing through Old French 'abominable' from Latin 'abominabilis', and 'abomination' arrived around the same time via Old French 'abominacion' from Latin 'abominationem'. So while 'abominate' the verb came late, its family had already been living in English for three hundred years.
One of the most curious chapters in the word's history involves a famous medieval spelling mistake. For centuries, scholars wrote 'abhominable', inserting an 'h' after the 'ab-' prefix. This led people to incorrectly believe the word came from the Latin 'ab homine', meaning 'away from man' or 'contrary to human nature'. Shakespeare even plays on this false etymology in 'Love's Labour's Lost', where a character is mocked for spelling the word with an 'h'. The error was so widespread and so confidently believed that it shaped how people understood the word's meaning — as something fundamentally against humanity itself — for generations.
Over time, the original religious terror faded from the word and what remained was pure, intense disgust. To abominate something today carries no overtone of omens or gods; it simply means to hate something with your whole being. Yet there is still something faintly extreme about it — you do not abominate minor inconveniences. The word retains a grand, almost ceremonial quality, as if hatred of this kind deserves its own solemn vocabulary. It is a word that announces itself, that insists the thing being hated is not merely unpleasant but deeply, fundamentally wrong.