Arousing amazement

Usage examples of portentous.

Fully recognized as portentous, the question was exhaustively discussed, with the confident assurances of some matched by the doubts and ambivalence of others, both military and civilian.

But he had not yet delivered his portentous message, and so he begged the phantoms to wait for him only a little while, until he fulfilled this last mission and informed the Archimage of the great danger.

Everett Everett Barr passed the portentous strip of photographic paper around for examination.

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Throughout the trilogy, he had used portentous statements hinting of ultimate success or failure, of infinite peril or unmatched significance, to heighten the intensity of the story.

Carpenter, with his identification plaque strapped to the palm of his open upraised hand for easy display to every laser scanner he met along the way, went from level to level, up one and down the next, following the portentous instructions of invisible metallic voices, until at last he came to the waterfront itself, ashimmer in a bright green haze of midday heat.

Perhaps if Rachel Lake had been in Belgravia, leading a town life, the matter would have taken no such dark colouring and portentous proportions.

Vern here began a portentous lecture on military science, military discipline, military tactics, and other sorts of militaryism, but his English was so wretched, his ideas so sky-blathering, his martial ardour so knocking down, that no one could make anything out of his blabberdom.

Two bull pups which had flown at him with portentous growls and yelps of menace now gamboled idiotically about him, writhing with anticipation of caresses, and a gray and scarlet parrot, rudely awakened, launched forth upon a musical effort resembling the song of a rusty cart-wheel.

And the more he thought about it, the more insistent grew the claims of little Bourcelles, and the more that portentous Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs faded into dimness.

He would delight them equally by his anecdotes of witchcraft and of the direful omens and portentous sights and sounds in the air which prevailed in the earlier times of Connecticut, and would frighten them woefully with speculations upon comets and shooting stars, and with the alarming fact that the world did absolutely turn round and that they were half the time topsy-turvy.

As they followed Thern Eldred along the side of one, Gordon glimpsed the portentous muzzles of its heavy atom-gun batteries silhouetted against the stars.

For anyone who has witnessed a portentous scientific finding in the making - the July 1994 impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter comes to mind - it will be clear that scientists tend to be effervescent and uncontainable.

Everywhere, all over the world, the historian of the early twentieth century finds the same thing, the flow and rearrangement of human affairs inextricably entangled by the old areas, the old prejudices and a sort of heated irascible stupidity, and everywhere congested nations in inconvenient areas, slopping population and produce into each other, annoying each other with tariffs, and every possible commercial vexation, and threatening each other with navies and armies that grew every year more portentous.

Strether recognised in him the mere portentous rumination to which Miss Barrace had so good-humouredly described herself as assigning a corner of her salon.