Other forms: premonitions
A premonition is a feeling that something is going to happen, usually something bad, and usually with nothing to base it on.
The word carries a faint chill: people have premonitions about accidents and illnesses, not about lunch. It sits close to intuition but is not the same — intuition is about what is true now, a premonition is about what is coming. The everyday alternatives are a feeling or a bad feeling, which is what most people actually say; premonition is the written word.
1nounpremonitionA feeling that something, usually bad, is about to happen.~95%
“She had a premonition about the flight and changed the booking.”
synonyms: foreboding, presentiment
2nounearlyAn early warning of something.~5%
“The tremor was a premonition of what came that night.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 58 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense (38 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
pre-MON-ition → a deMON
A small demon sits on your shoulder the morning before it happens, whispering that it is going to happen.
hooks ontodemon
Latin prae, before, and monere, to warn — the same verb behind monitor and admonish. A premonition is a warning that arrives ahead of the thing.
Proto-Indo-European
*men-
Latin
praemonitus
Ecclesiastical Latin
praemonitiōnem — a forewarning
Anglo-Norman
premunition
English, today
premonition
Built from
First use appears c. 1533. From Anglo-Norman premunition, from Ecclesiastical Latin praemonitiōnem (“a forewarning”), form of praemonitiō, from Latin praemonitus, past participle of praemoneō, from prae (“before”) (English pre-) + moneō (“to warn”) (from which English monitor). Compare Germanic forewarning.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA