What's the difference between menacing and portentous?

Menacing


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Menace

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The menace we’re facing – and I say we, because no one is spared – is embodied by the hooded men who are ravaging the cradle of civilization.
  • (2) But when in mid-October two of the artists received death threats, the menaces were widely reported and rekindled debate, prompting vicious, anti-Muslim comments on Danish talk shows.
  • (3) We will together face the terrorist menace,” said Jean-Claude Juncker , president of the European commission, whose headquarters lie just a few hundred metres from the metro.
  • (4) Aneurysmal occlusion with an extrafocal shunt can allow one-stage surgery when aneurysm and neoplasm are equally menacing.
  • (5) It is a gripping read from the opening, with the Ku Klux Klan menacing his pregnant mother, through to the troubled last months of his life: we follow Malcolm Little, common thief, on his journey to Malcolm X , inspirational leader.
  • (6) After her release, she confirmed that she had been pressured by threats and menaces to confess to criminal acts that she had never perpetrated.
  • (7) Although chronic total coronary occlusions are no clinical menace in contrast to stenoses, they frequently deserve revascularization and are the reason to select bypass surgery over angioplasty.
  • (8) Zimmerman was charged with an offence of sending by public communication network an offensive, indecent, obscene, menacing message or matter.
  • (9) The former Conservative chief whip Andrew Mitchell was a Jekyll and Hyde character who employed a mixture of charm and menace, his libel trial against the Sun newspaper over the Plebgate affair heard.
  • (10) The family member was one of five men executed by Isis in the terror group’s latest propaganda video, shot in the head as they submitted to their tormentors while a new English-speaking frontman made menacing threats to Britain.
  • (11) The bill should authorize stiff fines for unruly dog behavior – to include noise violations from sustained barking and lunging – and misdemeanor criminal penalties for menacing waitstaff and patrons.
  • (12) Maged understands better than most the menace of coastal erosion, which is steadily ingesting the edge of Egypt in some places at an astonishing rate of almost 100m a year.
  • (13) Now the focus seems to be on new geographic menaces rather than new technological ones.
  • (14) Authorities were preparing for a "worst-case scenario" on Thursday as a blaze dubbed the "Springs fire" menaced the 101 freeway along Camarillo, a city in Ventura County, and raced towards the coast.
  • (15) But if you do, yet still allow your editors to use inciteful over insightful language, then far from standing up for Britain, you're a menace against all things that make it great.
  • (16) The club’s new president, Bruno de Carvalho, has denounced as a “menace” and “monster” the funds to whom majority stakes in almost the club’s entire squad were sold before he was elected in March 2013 and he vowed to end the practice.
  • (17) 2.32pm BST Blimey... Tom Williams (@tomwfootball) Menacing sight en route to the Maracanã.
  • (18) It's an extraordinary, sprawling world, powered by magic and steampunk technology, populated by humans, cactus-people, insectoid, amphibian and avian races, dripping with myths and monsters and menaced by repressive regimes.
  • (19) For days, BBC reporters on the spot repeated the words panic, threat and menace by the hour.
  • (20) (A little later, I watch director Foley ask a genially menacing professor Capaldi to lift, and lift, and lift, the needle from a record in, I think it was, 12 different ways, to get it just so; I think "stickler" is fair.)

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.