damnedest
damnedest Lexical Profile
damnedest Game Scores & Validity
• noun
One's utmost or greatest possible effort (especially in the phrase 'do one's damnedest').
"The rescue crew did their damnedest to reach the stranded hikers before nightfall."
Something extraordinary, baffling, or remarkable.
"Watching the dog figure out how to unlatch the gate by himself was the damnedest."
• adjective
Most extraordinary, remarkable, bizarre, or frustrating (used informally for emphasis after 'the').
"The mechanic told us it was the damnedest engine malfunction he had ever encountered in thirty years."
Word Nuance & Usage
Although frequently pronounced without the middle syllable in casual speech, the standard spelling is 'damnedest' rather than 'damndest'. As a noun, it appears almost exclusively in the idiom 'do one's damnedest' (to try one's hardest), while as an adjective it requires the definite article 'the'.