Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- In a portentous manner; ominously; monstrously; wonderfully.
Wiktionary
WordNet 3.0
- adv. in a portentous manner
Etymologies
- portentous + -ly (Wiktionary)
Examples
“Conversely, conversions to Catholicism have been dwarfed by these losses.27 More portentously, the average age of Catholic converts today is about sixty-five, suggesting that conversion to Catholicism was largely a phenomenon of the 1950s and 1960s, when non-Catholics marrying Catholics were expected to convert.”
“However, in a chapter portentously titled “How to Be a Sportscaster When You Grow Up,” the authors not only manage to outshine expectations with some enjoyable advice, they also preach the following:”
“Roy Hodgson has a wild and frazzled look, like a minor character in a disaster movie who keeps popping up babbling portentously and is routinely shunned and disparaged, but who then gets to cackle with an air of demented triumph when the sky finally darkens with radioactive bees.”
The Guardian: Wayne Rooney, Americans and the terrible burden of ambition
“These well-meaning interventionists, after some deliberation, would declare portentously that this citizenry were in dire need of the assistance of the state.”
Mexico's endless Pacific beach: sun, surf, sand, seafood and solitude
“The promo for next week intoned portentously that "more SECRETS will be revealed ...", which made me roll my eyes a bit.”
“With a flourish of trumpets, the portentously-named All-Party Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism has begun its hearings.”
“Louis surveyed me with his shrewd grey eyes, and shook his head portentously.”
“This is the terrible spectre which Mr. John Graham Brooks sees looming portentously over the twentieth-century world.”
“Other plazas play host to the good and the bad as in Beijing's Tian'anmen Square in 1989 basking portentously in the post-Soviet glow of an explosive democratic freedom only to bleed a few days later into a convenient corral for firing squads.”
“Call Of Juarez and its portentously named prequel, Bound In Blood, followed the McCall brothers as they carved a path of violence across the wild west.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘portentously’.
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Best words ever
The most awesome words.
abacot, aristology, autohagiography, backronym, bafflegab, bodacious, boustrophedonic, brobdingnagian, bromopnea, cachinnatory, dactylonomy, eagre and 26 more...
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Rognons of Random Palavery
Another of my random palavery lists for terms and phrases that don't fit into any of my other lists.
priorship, exigeant, refectory, reestablish, capper, reesed, quar, reprune, orificial, reaming-iron, terminist, terminism and 3097 more...
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Adverbia
A long list of adverbs, beginning with full-drive. Someone had to list them. This list in continued in the list More Adverbia.
Read some sniping and some informative commentary about a...full-drive, portentously, unlawfully, legally, heterogeneously, consumingly, clancularly, inconsolably, prepositionally, retrogressively, symptomatically, decrepitly and 2460 more...
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My Idiosyncratic Jargon
I have my own vocabulary filled up by these seemingly off-kilter terms/expressions/interjections/intensifiers. I hated my frenemies (a.k.a. classmates who kept copying my idiosyncratic diction) for...
batshitcrazy, frakkin, manichean, terpsichore, opprobrium, ignominy, alacrity, tautology, pleonasm, opprobriously, Sisyphean, schadenfreude and 35 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for portentously.

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