portentous

How To Use portentous In A Sentence

• And the tremendous skull of the great hog of Oakham hung, a portentous ivory overmantel, with a Chinese jar in either eye socket, snout down above the fire .... The Food of the Gods and how it came to Earth
• Society-wide measures of religious behavior muffle portentous change that may be occurring at the younger edge of the population, so social prognosticators just like commercial advertisers focus on trends among young adults, trying to discern which aspects of behavior are what they are because the youths are young, and which aspects are what they are because of when they are young. American Grace
• As if fulfilling the portentous predictions of some medieval soothsayer, the first year of this new century has witnessed an unprecedented catalogue of warnings of the cumulative effects of climate change.
• As the portentous millennium approached, evangelical thoughts turned to the long-awaited Second Coming of Christ and thence to Armageddon.
• Last month the judges -- bleary-eyed from reading 130 nominated books each -- attacked publishers for submitting works they called "portentous," "pretentious" and "pompous. Eyes On The Prize
• Instead, they became even brassier, the graphics still more explosively portentous, the panics more moral. It's a good week for … Britain
• Her face was fixed on her, through the night; she was the creature who had escaped by force from her cage, yet there was in her whole motion assuredly, even as so dimly discerned, a kind of portentous intelligent stillness. The Golden Bowl — Complete
• The problem with the book is that it sometimes descends into portentous philosophizing.
• The dinner stood, but there was a desire already more powerful than the appetite for shows, already more efficient in turning the man’s mind away from his grim prepossession with his past than any theatre could be, and that was an enormous curiosity and perplexity about this Boomfood and these Boom children — this new portentous giantry that seemed to dominate the world. The Food of the Gods and how it came to Earth
• The same might be said of slow-moving animation that aims at portentous but achieves boring.