baleful
EN • English
//ˈbeɪl.fəl//
Definitions & Usage
adjective
#1Portending evil; ominous.
Example: “I learned the speech of birds; now every tree
Screams out to me a baleful prophecy.”
Translations:
adjective
#2(obsolete) Miserable, wretched, distressed, suffering.
Translations:
Notable Literary & Historical Quotes
“The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms, Amidst the soundless solitudes immense Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.”
— 1873, James Thomson (B.V.), The City of Dreadful Night:
“According to them all sorcerers, necromancers and evil-doers were born under the baleful influence of the seventh calendic sign[.]”
— 1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 186:
“[…] he went off alone with his family, and, watched by the day's red baleful eye, pumped the pump-car homeward, […]”
— 1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter XII, in Capricornia, New York: D. Appleton-Century, published 1943, page 194:
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