What's the difference between foreboding and portentous?

Foreboding


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Forebode
  • (n.) Presage of coming ill; expectation of misfortune.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) In a scene of young soldiers at rest for a few minutes at the front, he takes us into their heads: one full of dire forebodings, another singing, one trying to identify a bird on a tree – soldiers dreaming of girls’ breasts, dogs, sausages and poetry.
  • (2) Facebook Twitter Pinterest With foreboding I edge on to forbidden terrain.
  • (3) The theme here is hopeful, aspirant – but there's a foreboding sense that everyone involved may not get quite what they wished for.
  • (4) Paul writes: Dawn this morning in Washington DC, beneath an unusually foreboding sky.
  • (5) Today's professional nurse has access to current technology and possesses the assessment skills and knowledge that enable early recognition of signs and symptoms foreboding potentially disastrous complications.
  • (6) Its opening images – aerial shots of Tom's little car amid bare, ploughed fields – are reminiscent of the overhead photography of the Torrance family car early in The Shining , evoking the same sense of exposure, isolation and foreboding.
  • (7) Alencar wrote, "The preoccupation with health was frequent: either he was having the consequences of a fit or was foreboding one".
  • (8) Luther was my most obvious expression of this.” Osborne quoted by WJ Weatherby “The nag of disquiet and all the inescapable forebodings with which I had been born were so rooted that they couldn’t be dismissed by the pleasure, the luxuries, the companionships and liberations that I felt I should have been enjoying at this point in my life.” Osborne on life in the early 1960s in Almost a Gentleman.
  • (9) This means they receive no help from their local authority, or from family, neighbours or friends.” Calling for an urgent injection of cash into both services, it said: “Unless there is significant change to the funding of our health and social care system for older people as a result of decisions taken in the government’s spending review [next month], we look to the future with considerable foreboding.” The Department of Health disputed the charity’s claim that the social care budget had shrunk by £1.85bn over the last decade and would fall by another £470m this year.
  • (10) The developmental significance of adolescence experienced under conditions of social isolation and rejection with forebodings of the Holocaust was unrecognized in sanctioned silence and shared analytic denial.
  • (11) Civilians have paid a brutal price during this conflict, and we are filled with the deepest foreboding for those who remain in this last hellish corner of opposition-held eastern Aleppo,” said Rupert Colville, the UN’s human rights spokesman, before the ceasefire deal emerged.
  • (12) However, I am filled with great foreboding when I reflect that the said political-constitutional crisis is going to run concurrent with the sharp deterioration in economic conditions as foreshadowed in this not exactly morale-boosting effort from Mr Hammond.
  • (13) Although the official Franks report published the year after the Argentinian invasion concluded that it "could not have been foreseen", the newly opened documents detail the growing sense of foreboding among key figures.
  • (14) It’s the kind of spirit that won them the MLS Cup last year, and such continuation is somewhat foreboding for the rest of the league.
  • (15) But for Gabrielsson it was also heavy with foreboding.
  • (16) All animals are equal,” said the foreboding sign on the barn at the end of Animal Farm, “but some animals are more equal than others.” George Orwell wrote that, mockingly, as an attack on fascism.
  • (17) The volume went down immediately and the sense of foreboding during that part of the night was not eased by the fact that Montenegro were defending with great togetherness.
  • (18) The sense of foreboding that surrounded Leicester City after they sent eyebrows everywhere skywards by replacing Nigel Pearson with Claudio Ranieri during a difficult summer has been blasted away by a team whose desire to prove a point has brought them six from their first two matches.
  • (19) I kind of wish he had been more foreboding, but he's just very friendly."
  • (20) Despite these forebodings, clubs from across Europe are plotting to wrench Crocodile Rooney from his primitive existence in the English outback and plunge him straight into a concrete jungle, where he will have to fend for himself with nothing but a sharpened stick and a salary of over £250,000 per week.

Portentous


Definition:

  • (a.) Of the nature of a portent; containing portents; foreshadowing, esp. foreshadowing ill; ominous.
  • (a.) Hence: Monstrous; prodigious; wonderful; dreadful; as, a beast of portentous size.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) David Moyes' first season in charge of United has been conspicuously torrid one, but a win here tonight would earn him no shortage of goodwill from supporters anxious for portents of better things to come next season.
  • (2) Theranos is a perfect tech company name – it sounds mysterious, Greek and portentous.
  • (3) In the letter written to the papers by 60 leading medical professionals on the first day of the House of Lords debate two weeks ago, they said portentously "the British people do not support the privatisation of the NHS".
  • (4) Even before final results were announced a statement from Romney, who was campaigning in Texas, sought to capitalise on the victory by acclaiming it a portent of what was to come.
  • (5) But the commander made it clear he considered full withdrawal to be a portent of disaster.
  • (6) The portents do not look good for Malaysia's opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim , whose trial on highly dubious sodomy charges draws to a close this week.
  • (7) The advocacy of computer operators' needs by user-welfare groups, universities, labor unions, and government agencies are portents for achieving genuine improvements.
  • (8) Russell Crowe looks on stentorian form as the pre-flood patriarch, reeling from portents of the apocalypse and determined to protect his wife (Jennifer Connelly), his adopted daughter (Emma Watson) and the animals of the world.
  • (9) In previous tournaments that might have been seen as typical of the Murphy’s law that seems to apply to England at international competitions or at least as an ominous portent of things to come.
  • (10) Certain fishes have occasional circulating erythroplastids, conceptually a portent of phylogenetic changes in higher vertebrates.
  • (11) "My older brother Matt did it," he said, portentously, "I have to beat him."
  • (12) 42.5% - show that head injuries are most frequent; however, lesions of shoulders and upper and lower extremities are far more portentous ++ to the affected players in many respects.
  • (13) It is up to Wenger now to prove it was a blip rather than a portent of things to come.
  • (14) The ongoing refugee crisis in Europe is a portent, the last thing China wants to face in its own back yard.
  • (15) Today those theories are Film School 101, and Battleship Potemkin's technique is talked about more than its political portent.
  • (16) He described the Community Shield as being somewhere between a pre-season friendly and a Premier League fixture and he cautioned against it being treated as a portent for the season.
  • (17) These two cases serve to alert the physician that severe hypocholesterolemia is a portentous finding that may be associated both with a wide variety of diseases and with a high mortality rate.
  • (18) Add it all together and the portents are highly encouraging.
  • (19) After a party conference season in which health funding pledges were prominent, and with the NHS set to feature heavily in the runup to the 2015 general election, the byelection is a portent of political battles to come.
  • (20) The portent of these different haemostatic mechanisms upon repair of the endothelial cell wall and neovascularization have yet to be determined.