baleful
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /ˈbeɪl.fəl/
Forms: form: more baleful
form: most baleful
form: balefull
Etymology: From Middle English baleful, balful, baluful, from Old English bealuful, which was equivalent to bealu + -ful. By surface analysis, bale (“evil, woe”) + -ful. See bale for further etymology.
Senses: examples: text: The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.
ref: 1873, James Thomson (B.V.), The City of Dreadful Night:
text: According to them all sorcerers, necromancers and evil-doers were born under the baleful influence of the seventh calendic sign[.]
ref: 1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 186:
text: […] he went off alone with his family, and, watched by the day's red baleful eye, pumped the pump-car homeward, […]
ref: 1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter XII, in Capricornia, New York: D. Appleton-Century, published 1943, page 194:
text: I learned the speech of birds; now every tree
Screams out to me a baleful prophecy.
ref: 1949, Naomi Replansky, “Complaint of the Ignorant Wizard” in Ring Song (published 1952)
text: Few people cast a more baleful shadow over postwar Britain than Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper”, who has died aged 74
ref: 2020 November 13, Duncan Campbell, “Peter Sutcliffe obituary”, in The Guardian:
text: In their excellent essay in The Atlantic endorsing disqualification, Luttig and Tribe remind us that the first president, in his 1796 Farewell Address, had foreseen many of the elements of this baleful disaster.
ref: 2023 September 2, Simon Schama, “The real Rino”, in FT Weekend, Life & Arts, page 2:
synonyms: word: foreboding
word: portentous
word: augurous
word: baleful
word: bodeful
word: boding
word: dire
word: disastrous
word: fatal
word: foreboding
word: ill-boding
word: ill-fated
word: ill-omened
word: ill-starred
word: inauspicate
word: inauspicious
word: nefastous
word: omenic
word: ominous
word: brooding
word: portentous
word: presageful
word: presagious
word: prodigious
word: sinister
word: star-crossed
word: sullen
glosses: Portending evil; ominous.
examples: text: Thou balefull Messenger, out of my sight:
ref: 1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii], line 48:
text: round he throws his baleful eyes, that witnessed huge affliction and dismay […]
ref: 1667, John Milton, “Book I”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a]nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a]nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, line 56:
glosses: Miserable, wretched, distressed, suffering.
examples: text: With balefull weedes, and precious Iuiced flowers, / The earth that's Natures mother, is her Tombe,
ref: c. 1591–1595 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iii], page 60:
text: If some were akin to the Formori of the baleful fogs in Irish mythic history and the Mallt-y-nos, those she-demons of marshy lands immortalised by the Welsh bards, creatures huge and uncouth "with grey and glaring eyes," there were others who exceeded in beauty anything human.
ref: 1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, London: Longmans, Green and Co., page 14:
synonyms: fatal
lethal
terminal
glosses: Deadly, mortal.
Derived terms: balefully
balefulness
unbaleful