Uzhas (ужас)

In English, we have any number of ways of saying something is ‘very bad’: terrible, horrible, dreadful, horrific, horrendous, disgusting, beastly – everyone has their own preferred adjective and each of them has a slightly different connotation depending on the specific form and level of awfulness that it’s referring to. In Bulgarian, you just have uzhas. Perhaps Bulgarians simply don’t need all those variations because everything here is so good? That said, you do hear the word uzhas a lot. In fact, if you didn’t know any other words in Bulgarian, you could probably get by with just dobre and uzhas.