Find the word definition

Crossword clues for foreboding

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
foreboding
noun
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ "Jeanie, I have to go away," he said, his voice full of foreboding.
▪ As they waited at the airfield, Sara had the same feeling of foreboding that she had felt before her father died.
▪ He had a sudden sense of foreboding. Something was wrong, very wrong.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Although the fresh night air was welcome, Jack was again aware of an unusual feeling of dread and foreboding.
▪ But I am not given to entertaining forebodings.
▪ Eating in zero gravity was no real problem, contrary to the dark forebodings of the early astronauts.
▪ Nobody was there, but the air was heavy with a sense of foreboding.
▪ Travelling to the Continent now I feel a gloomy foreboding, for there is a whiff of decline in the air.
▪ Whether Ursula shared her growing sense of foreboding she did not know.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Foreboding

Forebode \Fore*bode"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Foreboded; p. pr. & vb. n. Foreboding.] [AS. forebodian; fore + bodian to announce. See Bode v. t.]

  1. To foretell.

  2. To be prescient of (some ill or misfortune); to have an inward conviction of, as of a calamity which is about to happen; to augur despondingly.

    His heart forebodes a mystery.
    --Tennyson.

    Sullen, desponding, and foreboding nothing but wars and desolation, as the certain consequence of C[ae]sar's death.
    --Middleton.

    I have a sort of foreboding about him.
    --H. James.

    Syn: To foretell; predict; prognosticate; augur; presage; portend; betoken.

Foreboding

Foreboding \Fore*bod"ing\, n. Presage of coming ill; expectation of misfortune.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
foreboding

late 14c., "a predilection, portent, omen," from fore- + verbal noun from bode. Meaning "sense of something bad about to happen" is from c.1600. Old English equivalent form forebodung meant "prophecy." Related: Forebodingly.

Wiktionary
foreboding
  1. Of ominous significance; serving as an ill omen; foretelling of harm or difficulty. n. 1 A sense of evil to come. 2 An evil omen. v

  2. (present participle of forebode English)

WordNet
foreboding
  1. adj. of ominous significance [syn: fateful, foreboding(a), portentous]

  2. n. a feeling of evil to come; "a steadily escalating sense of foreboding"; "the lawyer had a presentiment that the judge would dismiss the case" [syn: premonition, presentiment, boding]

  3. an unfavorable omen

Usage examples of "foreboding".

But in spite of the foreboding and the grave warnings of friends, at the Amritsar Congress in 1919 I fought for co-operation and working the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, hoping that the Prime Minister would redeem his promise to the Indian Mussalmans, that the Punjab wound would be healed and that the reforms inadequate and unsatisfactory though they were, marked a new era of hope in the life of India.

With such thoughts and forebodings were the minds of the men filled as they approached the towering ruins of the ancient Atlantian city.

And now, waiting beneath the grey, gravid sky, there was a foreboding that recalled his deepest memories, distant childhood images of chilled teeth, bewilderment, and dread.

The stillness grated on his ears as he looked around for Hala, as he scrambled to the entrance and the long foreboding halls that he never wanted to be alone within, listening for movement, for footsteps in the rubble.

The other two Iliadic armings are those of Patroclus, full of pathos, and of Achilles, full of wrath, but also of foreboding, for it is on this occasion that the horse Xanthos prophesies his coming death.

Underlying the autumn chill was the bite of something ominous, a feeling of foreboding that hung in the air as if the universe were waiting for something to happen.

To laypeople, menopause is an inevitable fact of life, albeit often a painful one anticipated with foreboding.

O Queen, when he was here, and you were used to charm his melancholy and make a pish of his phantastical humorous forebodings.

Even now as he walked back to Porterhouse through the snow-covered streets he was filled with foreboding and a tendency to waddle.

With her lovely body, with those breasts and those white, strong, healthy arms and legs, she would still tempt him often and embrace him and derive pleasure from him and then rest and sleep deeply, satiated, without pain, without dread, without foreboding, beautiful and torpid and stupid as a healthy, sleeping animal.

While the upper levels felt spookily abandoned, the depths beneath the tower had a palpable aura of immediate menace and foreboding.

He struggled to keep his invention aloft, at the same time fighting the inner squall that had been whipped up by the foreboding discussion he had overheard in the Strychnos tower ducts.

London, and it was with a heart heavy with gloomy forebodings that Mozart said good-bye to his truest friend.

But this morning had found him uprooted from the security of his home, the long-ingrained routines, the surety of his woodshop job and the status accrued in the course of living twenty years within those foreboding walls.

Taking a little more claret and dipping one of the cakes in it, he shook his head and smiled at Ada and me with an ingenuous foreboding that he never could be made to understand.