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Middlemarch vocabulary
551 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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portent
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synonyms: presage, presentiment ???
► definition
Definition:a sign or warning that something momentous is likely to happen
► uses
Uses:
Prince: Ah, Blackadder. It has been a wild afternoon full of strange omens. I dreamt that a large eagle circled the room three times and then got into bed with me and took all the blankets - and then I saw that it wasn't an eagle at all but a large black snake. Also Duncan's horses did turn and eat each other - as usual. Good portents for your duel, do you think?
BBC. Blackadder, season 3: Duel and Duality
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Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of "Ho! the fair wind! oh-ye-ho cheerly, men!" the crew singing for joy, that so promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding it.
Herman Melville. Moby Dick
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Still, now and then, I received a damping check to my cheerfulness; and was, in spite of myself, thrown back on the region of doubts and portents, and dark conjectures.
Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre (1847)
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that name which, at the moment when I heard it, seemed to me fuller, more portentous than any other name, because it was burdened with the weight of all the occasions on which I had secretly uttered it in my mind.
Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 1] Swann’s Way
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"Now, Handel," as if it were the grave beginning of a portentous business exordium, he had suddenly given up that tone, stretched out his honest hand, and spoken like a schoolboy.
Charles Dickens. Great Expectations (1861)
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