An official prohibition or edict against something

Usage examples of forbidding.

Behind us rose a dark and forbidding wood of giant arborescent ferns intermingled with the commoner types of a primeval tropical forest.

But Bucher immediately modified the command, forbidding personnel from going topside.

The cayote lives chiefly in the most desolate and forbidding desert, along with the lizard, the jackass-rabbit and the raven, and gets an uncertain and precarious living, and earns it.

Rocks and bushes and clumps of raspberry vine that were familiar and friendly in the light of day soon became strange and forbidding night shapes, weirdly lit and twisted beneath the moon.

Inside the office with the door closed behind them, Laurie glanced anxiously towards Rian, thinking his features had grown more forbidding and cynically withdrawn.

Animals bulkier than the Diplodocus or more forbidding than tyrannosaurus may have roamed the Earth in the thousands, and we may never know it.

Fifteenth Amendment, now proposed, did not attempt to declare affirmatively that the negro should be endowed with the elective franchise, but it did what was tantamount, in forbidding to the United States or to any State the power to deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

To my right the bottom of the cliff was lost in the dense foliage of the forest, which terminated at its very foot, rearing its gorgeous foliage fully a thousand feet against its stern and forbidding neighbour.

And so Crown Prince Vindax flew on to Ninar Foan, a bleak and forbidding castle looming over a drab town, its rough stone walls swept by the chill winds of the Rand and lit by a reluctant red sun.

And now, though Jane did not acknowledge to herself that she regretted the old state of things, still less that she feared the future, it was undeniable that the past seemed very bright in her memory, and that something weighed upon her heart, forbidding such gladsomeness as she had known.

I remained an indifferent witness of the play, and it gave me an opportunity of realizing how wise Mahomet had been in forbidding all games of chance.

They were indignant enough then, and the husband said that if she had really quartered herself on me in that fashion, all I had to do was to get an injunction from the courts forbidding her to put her foot within my doors.

Costa told me that the auditor had revenged my contempt of his orders by forbidding the post authorities to furnish any horses for my carriage.

I smiled to myself at her doctrines, which were as much as to say that the best way of curing appetite was to place a series of appetising dishes before a hungry man, forbidding him to touch them.

The abbe tried to speak to me, but I sternly declined to have anything to say to him, strictly forbidding Clairmont to admit him to my apartments.