Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of the nature of or constituting a portent; foreboding: "The present aspect of society is portentous of great change” ( Edward Bellamy).
- adj. Full of unspecifiable significance; exciting wonder and awe: "Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity” ( Herman Melville).
- adj. Marked by pompousness; pretentiously weighty.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Of the nature of a portent; ominous; foreshowing ill.
- Monstrous; prodigious; wonderful.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Of the nature of a portent; containing portents; foreshadowing, esp. foreshadowing ill; ominous.
- adj. Hence: Monstrous; prodigious; wonderful; dreadful.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. of momentous or ominous significance
- adj. ominously prophetic
- adj. puffed up with vanity
Examples
“Harris's great skill lies in pulling back every time her creation veers towards the portentous, that is to say the Tolkienesque ....”
Runemarks: Summary and book reviews of Runemarks by Joanne Harris.
“The decision to allow infant baptism is described as portentous: a dramatic sign which foreshadows something.”
“Yes, this has been what you might call a portentous evening," agreed”
“Nation's whole name is Carrie Amelia Nation, but having noticed from old records that her father wrote the first name "Carry," she now does the same, and considers the name portentous as concerns what she is trying and means to do.”
“Mrs. Nation's whole name is Carrie Amelia Nation, but having noticed from old records that her father wrote the first name "Carry," she now does the same, and considers the name portentous as concerns what she is trying and means to do.”
“Last month the judges -- bleary-eyed from reading 130 nominated books each -- attacked publishers for submitting works they called "portentous," "pretentious" and "pompous.”
“Her face was fixed on her, through the night; she was the creature who had escaped by force from her cage, yet there was in her whole motion assuredly, even as so dimly discerned, a kind of portentous intelligent stillness.”
“Society-wide measures of religious behavior muffle portentous change that may be occurring at the younger edge of the population, so social prognosticators just like commercial advertisers focus on trends among young adults, trying to discern which aspects of behavior are what they are because the youths are young, and which aspects are what they are because of when they are young.”
“Because of its longevity as a shaper of the partisan landscape, changes in abortion attitudes are especially portentous.”
“The trend on attitudes toward abortion among young people likely has a different, but no less portentous, implication.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘portentous’.
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sdamle1
echt
echt, apocalypse, resurgence, forthright, logorrhea, mercurial, torrid, exorcise, obscure, intrusive, morose, vindictive and 100 more...
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Dominant/Submissive
single-minded, self-seeking, vain, territorial, stubborn, self-possessed, unwary, self-important, rigid, relentless, resolute, purposeful and 189 more...
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Mobying Along
looks like there's not an open Moby Dick list. So now there is.
hypos, Manhattoes, circumambulate, mole, grapnels, bowsprit, asphaltic, mazy, tranced, cataract, ungraspable, judgmatically and 227 more...
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SAT 2
platitude, parsimonious, perspicacious, catharsis, captious, munificent, penurious, arid, portentous, ossified, nascent, perfidy and 13 more...
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Words build meanings from origins( et...
These come from gamma meditation ,I think.
discursive, exogenous, machinations, purportedly, sumptuous, congruity, cantankerous, incongruous, festoon, hessian, ratiocinative, stratigraphic and 2046 more...
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Words describing singing voices
mellifluous, gravelly, rusty bathtub, velvet fog, howling, laconic, fluttering, quavery, hypnotic, stilted, lilting, sonorous and 47 more...
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Open List: SUGGESTIONS FOR THE UNDERS...
Recruiting all Wordieniks to introduce me to their best word friends!! If words were people, this is the list for ones I should meet and ones I will (hopefully) like.
gyre, penultimate, cake, schadenfreude, lacuna, skedaddle, schopfling, morphoanatomy, overscore, swasivious, brightling, phrontisserie and 17 more...
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gre words
convoluted, deride, melancholy, antagonize, antagonize, deference, portentous, prodigious, ruminate, ineffable, turgid, mossy and 58 more...
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GRE List 1
Words encountered during my GRE preparation.
Fug, Mimsy, Detente, Buncombe, Procrustean, Entente, Ratiocinate, Payola, Condign, Myrmidon, Prolepsis, Peccadillo and 4 more...
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gre2
aberrant, aberration, aboveboard, abrasive, abstemious, acme, admonish, affable, affluent, alacrity, allegory, alleviate and 1861 more...
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Words from Moby Dick
frigate, presumptuous, genteel, succor, hearthstone, gentry, factitious, bilious, insurgent, portent, enervate, genuflect and 303 more...
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apjoseph's words
insurmountable, ubiquitous, unequivocal, incumbent, asinine, amenable, sycophants, precarious, malevolent, gregarious, raison detra, nefarious and 200 more...
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Magoosh GRE
its a list of words borrowed from Magoosh GRE blog ,an indispensable resource for GRE test takers.
inimitable, exiguity, myriad, cornucopia, surfeit, glut, deluge, opaque, pellucid, grandiloquent, turgid, gadfly and 106 more...
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Vocabulary
Words I come across while reading.
talus, echelon, onanistic, cabochon, avocation, charnel, moue, portentous, prolixity, astringent, hoary, patina and 165 more...
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newGRE
mostly from magoosh
imbue, verge on, nonchalant, deliberate, timorous, futile, provisional, dissect, checked, tinged, alluring, visionary and 1046 more...
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My Revised GRE Preparation List
Words from the new GRE : This list consists mostly of words from the book Magoosh-GRE-vocab-ebook, which is one of the best vocab materials available, especially if you have started preparing one ...
mulct, dupe, pittance, stipend, defray, cupidity, avarice, prodigal, profligate, affluent, insolvent, penurious and 533 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for portentous.
jwjarvis on his talk show to weigh in on the portentous topic Nov 10, 2010
bilby "Once established before the grate, and consoling himself for the inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, Mr. Jackson became portentous and communicable."
- Edith Wharton, 'The Age of Innocence'. Sep 19, 2009
tea "Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight." pg 23, A People's History of the United States Dec 26, 2007