monster
n.— «The $30 worth of hits turned into a $3,000-a-month monster. Now the monster is Irene’s top priority. She’s been on crack three years. Three times in rehab. Three times a failure. “This is not an addiction that you can click off and on like a light switch,” she said. “You gotta set a goal and you work up towards that goal.”» —“Feeding the monster: Life of a cocaine addict” by Glenn E. Rice Kansas City Star (Kan., Mo.) Apr. 11, 1993. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Is there such a thing as a “neutral” accent, and if so what does it sound like? And that quirk in the way southern Californians talk about freeways. They’ll say things like take the 405 and get on the 8. Why the definite article...
Floordrobe is the new word for an old habit: piling your clothes on the floor instead of putting them away. The Oxford English Dictionary recently added an entry for it, defining floordrobe as “an untidy heap of discarded clothing left on the floor...