(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.
Wax
Definition:
(v. i.) To increase in size; to grow bigger; to become larger or fuller; -- opposed to wane.
(v. i.) To pass from one state to another; to become; to grow; as, to wax strong; to wax warmer or colder; to wax feeble; to wax old; to wax worse and worse.
(n.) A fatty, solid substance, produced by bees, and employed by them in the construction of their comb; -- usually called beeswax. It is first excreted, from a row of pouches along their sides, in the form of scales, which, being masticated and mixed with saliva, become whitened and tenacious. Its natural color is pale or dull yellow.
(n.) Hence, any substance resembling beeswax in consistency or appearance.
(n.) Cerumen, or earwax.
(n.) A waxlike composition used for uniting surfaces, for excluding air, and for other purposes; as, sealing wax, grafting wax, etching wax, etc.
(n.) A waxlike composition used by shoemakers for rubbing their thread.
(n.) A substance similar to beeswax, secreted by several species of scale insects, as the Chinese wax. See Wax insect, below.
(n.) A waxlike product secreted by certain plants. See Vegetable wax, under Vegetable.
(n.) A substance, somewhat resembling wax, found in connection with certain deposits of rock salt and coal; -- called also mineral wax, and ozocerite.
(n.) Thick sirup made by boiling down the sap of the sugar maple, and then cooling.
(v. t.) To smear or rub with wax; to treat with wax; as, to wax a thread or a table.
Example Sentences:
(1) The role of whole Mycobacteria, mycobacterial cell walls and waxes D as immunostimulants was well established many years ago.
(2) This study shows that the sensitivity and specificity of in situ hybridisation for the detection of EBV genomes in AIDS related lymphomas approaches that of Southern blotting, even when using routinely processed archival, paraffin wax embedded material.
(3) "The new feminine ideal is of egg-smooth perfection from hairline to toes," she writes, describing the exquisite agony of having her fingers, arms, back, buttocks and nostrils waxed.
(4) These were not observed in area 5, although here the distribution of callosal neurons waxed and waned in the tangential cortical plane.
(5) The equations of best fit of log(wax esters) vs age suggested that sebum secretion declines about 23% per decade in men and 32% per decade in women.
(6) Mycobacterium avium-intracellulare (MAI) can utilize paraffin wax as the sole carbon source in basal media.
(7) The separation of the defect margins from the reacting material by wax inhibited the bone regeneration.
(8) Wax D also induced small accumulations of macrophages.
(9) In all these cuticles the tubular filaments arise from the plasma membrane of the epidermal cells and they contain argentaffin material, regarded as sclerotin precursors, and lipid-staining material, regarded as wax precursors.
(10) The probe tip was a gold-plated pin, insulated from the saliva by soft wax.
(11) The new Poles are generally optimistic and open-minded, believing their destiny to be in their own hands, that Poland shouldn't be prisoner to its past and that the future waxes bright for their country.
(12) It is recommended to apply cast fillings with a replacement of the occlusive area as quickly after the wax mould as possible because of the diminished gap due to the motion of the teeth.
(13) Acrolein-fixed, polyester wax-embedded tissue sections showed excellent preservation of light microscopic architecture and, when stained with toluidine blue, intense color contrast between DNA, which stained orthochromatically, and RNA, which stained metachromatically.
(14) The use of the technique of wax-plate serial section-reconstruction, based on contiguous axial plane CT images of the upper thorax, to prepare a replica of the central air-way (trachea and major bronchi) of an infant with sling left pulmonary artery type 2B, with bridging bronchus, abortive right main bronchus, and tracheal stenosis due to absence of the tracheal pars membranacea with "ring" tracheal cartilages is described.
(15) When David Tennant was waxing eloquent in that legal drama The Escape Artist, no one yelled out from the jury that his watch looked bloody expensive.
(16) We describe a simple technique of inflation and wax impregnation for the permanent proof of congenital heart defects that can be used in routine perinatal necropsies.
(17) Nasopharyngeal biopsy specimens, formalin fixed and paraffin wax embedded, from 24 patients, eight with undifferentiated nasopharyngeal carcinoma, eight with well differentiated squamous carcinoma, and eight showing normal tissue histology, were analysed for the presence of Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) DNA by slot-blot hybridisation on extracted unamplified DNA, and also after amplification of EBV specific sequences by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).
(18) The wax contains a wide range of organic compounds.
(19) "There are plenty of things she can wax lyrical about without getting into tricky areas: the upcoming first world war centenary, the need for a more global outlook in the economy, the inspiring achievements of British parliamentary democracy."
(20) Free sterols, sterol esters, triglycerides, phospholipids were major components of cercarial lipids, triglycerides, wax esters, free fatty acids, squalen were major components of skin surface lipids.