All 8 Uses of
portentous
in
Moby Dick
- Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.†
Chpt 1-3 *
- But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a nameless yeast.†
Chpt 1-3
- But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture's midst.†
Chpt 1-3
- That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious assaults!†
Chpt 13-15
- Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox.†
Chpt 34-36
- But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.†
Chpt 40-42
- Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with portentousness.†
Chpt 58-60
- But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow lid of an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end, instead of one side.†
Chpt 73-75
Definition:
-
(portentous) very important; or indicating something important in the future
or:
acting overly important or serious