pandemoniac
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: pandemoniacs
Etymology: From pandemonium + -ac, after demoniac.
Senses: examples: text: […]and never did a conclave of popish pandemoniacs with their own Vulcan seated as and for their president, confronted by his deputy with hammer, tongs, and poker, for his triple trident, meet at any time (except to concoct and perpetrate a deed of blood, more or less direct) to determine upon an affair of more deep and dark importance, than that of the aforesaid junta of “old wives.”
ref: 1838, James (the Elder;) Humphrys, The Pioneers in Contrast. A Disquisition Descriptive Throughout of the Truly Simoniacal Use and Anti-Christian Abuse of Water, as at this Day Employed in the Matter of Baptism, Together with a Dialogue and Address: Being Absolutely Conclusive as to the Schismatical Character of the National System, Etc., London: […] E. Palmer and Son, […], pages 96–97:
text: […]and in his two hands were two wind instruments, which he used alternately for the production of sounds delicious to boys and pandemoniacs.
ref: 1872 June 29, “Bar One”, in Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading, volume I, number 26, Boston, Mass.: James R. Osgood and Company, page 722, column 1:
text: The fiend is no longer a pandemoniac—never safe unless loaded with chains and guarded by ponderous doors; but simply a harmless, eccentric creature whose permanent, or even temporary, turn of mind makes him, in a measure, ridiculous to that great world whose infinitesimal units, are, of course, entirely sane.
ref: 1896 April, P.B. Peabody, “The Photo Fiend”, in The Nidologist, volume 3, number 8, page 85:
text: Here, all down the coast, untimely ripped from bed, somnambulist mothers sterilize rubber nipples; tots are potted, junior pandemoniacs are urged to their nice quiet toys; fathers wish they weren't; and house-guests, having checked the child-proof bolts on doors, duck their heads under pillows.
ref: 1961, John Reeves, A Beach of Strangers: An Excursion, page 35:
text: It is my intention to summon forth all manner of banshee, bugaboo and bogybeast. To raise divers demons, dibbuks, ghouls and gorgons. To conjure pigwidgeons and pandemoniacs from those regions which are forever night.
ref: 1994, Robert Rankin, Raiders of the Lost Car Park, page 43:
glosses: One who delights in pandemonium and often causes it.
examples: text: The question is, therefore, whether we are to practise and to endure bad manners, and thereby to revert, as we must in that case, to the state of nature and the uses of pandemoniacs; or whether it would be not best and wisest for each of us both to pay to and to claim from all, those manifestations of mutual respect in which Good Manners consist.
ref: 1875 June 5, R., “Our Manners”, in Vanity Fair, London, page 311, column 1:
text: Well sah! wid dat he rushed for Brudder Cain, An' eberry brudder grabbed a brudder, and it is wid pain, I chronikle de windin' up of what started berry cibil; Sich a pandemoniac ez would shame de berry debil;
ref: 1882 April, J.A. Doyle, “De Bredden on Dancin'”, in The Elocutionist's Journal, number 43, page 3:
text: My spirit then sending signals through these partial diameters, through dangers magically implied by powers which roam the pandemoniacs of the Oort dimension.
ref: 2011, Will Alexander, Diary as Sin, page 156:
glosses: Something that is characterized by pandemonium.