adjective
definition
Of momentous or ominous significance.
synonyms
definition
Ominously prophetic.
synonyms
definition
Puffed up with vanity.
Examples of portentous in a Sentence
Then I assumed a rather portentous manner to prepare him.
The massacres they committed were portentous.
Reeve is anything but portentous, and even makes an occasional wisecrack at the expense of more self important environmental dystopias.
He saw man's lust, greed, gluttony, as in a vision, magnified, overwhelming, portentous.
A Serious Collection These slightly portentous thoughts were provoked by a recent visit to Mr Don Baker's museum in Mill Lane.
Yet this number, although it represents a portentous expenditure of labour, is insignificant compared with the multitude of the stellar throng; nor had any general tendency been discerned to regulate what seemed casual flittings until Professor Kapteyn, in 1904, adverted to the prevalence among all the brighter stars of opposite streamflows towards two " vertices " situated in the Milky Way (see Star).
Harting, in his and De Mosenthal's Ostriches and Ostrich Farming, from which the woodcut here introduced is by permission copied, gives (pp. 67-72) some portentous statistics of the destruction of rheas for the sake of their feathers, which, he says, are known in the trade as "Vautour" to distinguish them from those of the African bird.
The career of Napoleon, which had lured France far away from the principles of 1789, now brought her back to that starting-point; just as, in the physical sphere, his campaigns from1796-1814had at first enormously swollen her bulk and then subjected her to a shrinkage still more portentous.
Both contain occasional state papers, and not very trustworthy reports of parliamentary proceedings., The publication of debates was not authorized till the last quarter of the century; parliamentary papers begin earlier, but only slowly attain their present portentous dimensions.
Looking back, the designation appears and sounds absurdly portentous.
I tell you this is somehow easy tv guide becoming strangely portentous.
At its north-east corner access was given from the dormitory to the necessarium, a portentous edifice in the form of a Norman hall, 145 ft.
The subsequent coronation was marked by portentous novelties, the most significant of which was the king's omission to take the usual coronation oath, which omission was interpreted to mean that he considered himself under no obligation to his subjects.
This is said to have hapC, pened in 356 B.C. on the October night on which Alexander the Great came into the world, and, as Hegesias said, the goddess herself was absent, assisting at the birth; but the exactness of this portentous synchronism makes the date suspect.
The execution was as excellent as the conception, and if we reflect that it was begun in the midst of that momentous war which raised England to her climax of territorial greatness in East and West, we may easily realize how the task of describing these portentous and far-reaching events would be likely to strengthen Burke's habits of wide and laborious observation, as well as to give him firmness and confidence in the exercise of his own judgment.
In their conceptions a single social imperfection assumed such portentous dimensions that it seemed to overcloud the whole heaven and threaten the world with ruin.
Meanwhile, it is certain that what is strange, new or portentous is regularly treated by all savages as sacred.
His passion for details not only swelled his volumes to a portentous size, but was fatal to artistic construction.