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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
presentiment
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Heavy with presentiment, I turned around and walked back to my office.
▪ I didn't exactly have a presentiment - certainly not of anything like this happening.
▪ I have an intractable presentiment that I will soon start seeing them in Tod's dream.
▪ I understood that you had had some sort of presentiment of disaster.
▪ Since the unfortunate accident to your father, I have had the strangest presentiments concerning you, at times.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Presentiment

Presentiment \Pre*sen"ti*ment\, n. [Pref. pre- + sentiment: cf. F. pressentiment. See Presentient.] Previous sentiment, conception, or opinion; previous apprehension; especially, an antecedent impression or conviction of something unpleasant, distressing, or calamitous, about to happen; anticipation of evil; foreboding.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
presentiment

1714, from obsolete French presentiment (Modern French Related: pressentiment), from Middle French pressentir "to have foreboding," from Latin praesentire "to sense beforehand," from prae "before" (see pre-) + sentire "perceive, feel" (see sense (n.)).

Wiktionary
presentiment

n. A premonition; a feeling that something, often of undesirable nature, is going to happen.

WordNet
presentiment

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: foreboding, premonition, boding]

Usage examples of "presentiment".

Without knowing why it was a presentiment, perhaps Passepartout became vaguely uneasy.

A clerical gentleman named Pinker, he said, and I gave another of my visible starts, the presentiment stronger on the wing than ever.

I longed to see the day, for a presentiment which I held infallible told me that it would set me again at liberty.

Seeing deeper below the surface than I, and perchance having a presentiment of my misfortune, she was sick at heart.

It has been some presentiment of this difference of opinion that has probably induced you to forget me, while Beulah and my mother were passing so many hours to fill that basket.

How was it that a presentiment did not warn Mercedes that her lover was within three hundred yards of her?

I took care not to go myself nor to send my page, for whom I had an aversion which almost amounted to a presentiment.

I never laughed at presentiments in my life, because I have had strange ones of my own.

Vincent listen to my presentiments on that ever fatal day when he brought M.

Because, above all, I am following one of those inexplicable presentiments which never deceive.

I have had presentiments of evil, and I am really becoming superstitious!

The murdered woman had been promptly identified, and the circumstance that the crime had been committed on that plot of vacant ground but a hundred yards or so from the house where Norine and Cecile lived upset him, filled him with a terrible presentiment.

The child, therefore, in the womb would do what the father in the womb had done before him, nor should any trace of memory concerning circumcision be expected till the eighth day after birth, when, but for the fact that the impression in this case is forgotten almost as soon as made, some slight presentiment of coming discomfort might, after a large number of generations, perhaps be looked for as a general rule.

I was disposed to let him take everything, having a presentiment that I would win back all I had lost.

I am of opinion that the only foreboding in which man can have any sort of faith is the one which forbodes evil, because it comes from the mind, while a presentiment of happiness has its origin in the heart, and the heart is a fool worthy of reckoning foolishly upon fickle fortune.