baleful

English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Middle English baleful, balful, baluful, from Old English bealuful, which was equivalent to bealu +‎ -ful. By surface analysis, bale (“evil, woe”) +‎ -ful. See bale for further etymology.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈbeɪl.fəl/
  • Audio (Southern England):(file)

Adjective

baleful (comparative more baleful, superlative most baleful)

  1. Portending evil; ominous.
    Synonyms: foreboding, portentous; see also Thesaurus:ominous
    • 1873, James Thomson (B.V.), The City of Dreadful Night:
      The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
      Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
      Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.
    • 1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 186:
      According to them all sorcerers, necromancers and evil-doers were born under the baleful influence of the seventh calendic sign[.]
    • 1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter XII, in Capricornia‎[1], New York: D. Appleton-Century, published 1943, page 194:
      […] he went off alone with his family, and, watched by the day's red baleful eye, pumped the pump-car homeward, […]
    • 1949, Naomi Replansky, “Complaint of the Ignorant Wizard” in Ring Song (published 1952):
      I learned the speech of birds; now every tree
      Screams out to me a baleful prophecy.
    • 2020 November 13, Duncan Campbell, “Peter Sutcliffe obituary”, in The Guardian‎[2]:
      Few people cast a more baleful shadow over postwar Britain than Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper”, who has died aged 74
    • 2023 September 2, Simon Schama, “The real Rino”, in FT Weekend, Life & Arts, page 2:
      In their excellent essay in The Atlantic endorsing disqualification, Luttig and Tribe remind us that the first president, in his 1796 Farewell Address, had foreseen many of the elements of this baleful disaster.
  2. (obsolete) Miserable, wretched, distressed, suffering.
  3. (obsolete) Deadly, mortal.
    Synonyms: fatal, lethal, terminal
    • c. 1591–1595 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Romeo and Ivliet”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iii], page 60:
      With balefull weedes, and precious Iuiced flowers, / The earth that's Natures mother, is her Tombe,
    • 1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, London: Longmans, Green and Co., page 14:
      If some were akin to the Formori of the baleful fogs in Irish mythic history and the Mallt-y-nos, those she-demons of marshy lands immortalised by the Welsh bards, creatures huge and uncouth "with grey and glaring eyes," there were others who exceeded in beauty anything human.

Derived terms

Translations

Middle English

Alternative forms

Etymology

From Old English bealuful. By surface analysis, bale +‎ -ful.

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈbaːlful/, /ˈbalful/

Adjective

baleful

  1. evil, horrible, malicious
  2. (rare) dangerous, harmful, injurious
  3. (rare) worthless, petty, lowly

Derived terms

Descendants

  • English: baleful

References

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