a. [f. as prec. + -LIKE.] a. Resembling a fiend. b. Characteristic of a fiend.
1605. Shaks., Macb., V. viii. 69.
| This dead Butcher, and his Fiend-like Queene; | |
| Who (as ’tis thought) by selfe and violent hands, | |
| Tooke off her life. |
1716. Rowe, Ode for the New Year, 19.
| Ev’ry Fiend and Fiend-like Form, | |
| Black and sullen as a Storm. |
1774. Warton, Hist. Eng. Poetry, I. 160. The last circumstance recalls a fiend-like appearance drawn by Shakspeare; in which, exclusive of the application, he has converted ideas of deformity into the true sublime, and rendered an image terrible, which in other hands would have probably been ridiculous.
1804. J. Grahame, The Sabbath, 591.
| Doom’d to behold their wives, their little ones, | |
| Tremble beneath the white man’s fiend-like frown! |
1854. J. S. C. Abbott, Napoleon (1855), I. viii. 150. Wintry winds swept the bleak and icy eminence, and a clear, cloudless sky canopied the two armies, as, with fiend-like ferocity, they hurled themselves upon each other.
