Meaning
Extremely angry; full of fury. The word covers wild, uncontrolled rage - furious with the referee - and, by extension, anything violent or intense: a furious gale, a furious pace, furious arguing, furious growth. In older English it could also mean outright mad or insane, a sense now obsolete but recorded in the historical legal and medical vocabulary noted by the OED. Now mainly very angry, but survives in intensity senses - a furious pace, furious activity - and weather uses. The Furies connection is etymological kinship through Latin furia, not derivation; avoid phrasing that calls them the word's source. Regional use: Global English.
Origin
The popular story that furious comes from the Furies gets the chain backwards. English furious - the OED's earliest evidence is circa 1374, in Chaucer, verified directly - was borrowed from Old French furios, from Latin furiosus, full of rage or mad, from furia, rage, from furere, to rage or be mad, a verb of uncertain origin. The vengeance goddesses are a sibling, not a parent: the Romans used Furiae to translate Greek Erinyes, the chthonic avenging deities who punished wrongdoers and famously pursued the matricide Orestes; Virgil fixed their number at three - Alecto, Megaera, Tisiphone - in the Aeneid. So the Furies were named from the same Latin root as fury, not the other way around. The OED's subject areas for furious in Middle English include pathology, Scottish law and medicine, reflecting the old mad sense, with weather senses from the late 1500s.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a furious pace
- furious anger
- furiously
Usage Examples
- She was furious when the airline lost her luggage for the third time that year.
- The committee meeting ended in furious shouting over a budget line nobody had read.
- A furious gale tore at the rigging all night, and by dawn the mast was gone.