brimstone

noun

Etymology: From Middle English brymston, brimston, bremston, forms of brinston, brenston, bernston, from Old English brynstān (“brimstone”, literally “burn-stone”), equivalent to burn + stone. Cognate with Scots brunstane (“brimstone”), Icelandic brennisteinn (“sulfur / sulphur, brimstone”), German Bernstein (“amber”). Compare also brimfire. More at burn, stone. Although once a synonym for sulfur, the word is now largely restricted to poetic and Biblical usage.

1. The sulfur of hell; hell, damnation.

   “For griefe thereof, and diuelish despight, / From his infernall fournace forth he threw / Huge flames, that dimmed all the heauens light, / Enrold in duskish smoke and brimstone blew.”

   “And thus I sawe the horses in the vision, and them that sate on them, hauing brest-plates of fire and of Iacinct, and brimstone, & the heades of the horses were as the heads of Lions, and out of their mouthes issued fire, and smoke, and brimstone.”

2. Sulfur.

   “Weel I wot I wad be broken if I were to gie sic weight to the folk that come to buy our pepper and brimstone, and suchlike sweetmeats.”

   “Don't think, young man, that we go to the expense of flower of brimstone and molasses, just to purify them.”

3. A whore.

   “I went to the park, picked up a low Brimstone, called myself a Barber, & agreed with her for Sixpence, went to the bottom of the park, arm in arm, & dipped my machine in the Canal […].”

4. Used attributively as an intensifier in exclamations.

   “You are a brimstone pig. You're a head of swine!”

   “You're a brimstone idiot.”

5. The butterfly Gonepteryx rhamni of the Pieridae family.
6. Online content of exceptionally poor quality, lower than coal.