Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

foreboding

US/fɔɹˈbɔʊdɪŋ/
nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,886 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: forebodings

Foreboding is a feeling that something bad is coming. A sense of foreboding, filled with foreboding, dark foreboding.

It is always about something bad, which is what separates it from expectation, and it has no evidence behind it — that is the whole point. The fore- means before and the bode is an old verb meaning to announce, which survives in bode well.

Thomas from Philadelphia Area, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0

Definitions of foreboding

  1. 1nounforebodingA feeling that something bad is coming.C1

    “As the plane began to shake, she was filled with foreboding.”

foreboding is a feeling.

Where it comes from

Fore plus bode, from Old English bodian, to announce or foretell. Bode well keeps the verb alive.

  1. Middle English

    forbodyng

  2. English, today

    foreboding

From Middle English forbodyng, vorboding, equivalent to fore + bode + ing. Compare German Vorbote (“harbinger, omen”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Thinking & Memory

Practise this word

foreboding in the wild

  • The emotional response to darkness has led to metaphorical usages of the term in many cultures, often to convey feelings of unhappiness or foreboding.

    Darkness

  • Suzanne Berne is an American novelist known for her foreboding character studies involving unexpected domestic and psychological drama in bucolic suburban settings.

    Suzanne Berne

  • Artnet's Phyllis Tuchman described the work as "three black geometric shapes mounted on a tall concrete wall" and said, "After the rain, the metal is dark and foreboding.

    Houston Triptych

  • Ingres' expression is foreboding and intense, and he is tightly wrapped in stiff military-like clothes.

    Self-Portrait at Seventy-Eight (Ingres)

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • bode