Ominous

How to spell ominous

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce ominous

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ominous mean?

1. adjectiveGiving the impression that something bad or harmful is going to happen.

Ominous in a sentence

• An ominous silence fell over the office before the layoffs were announced.

• The ominous clouds gathering over the harbour warned the sailors to stay in port.

Where does ominous come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin ominosus, meaning 'full of foreboding' or 'predicting evil', which was built directly on omen, the Latin noun for a sign or token believed to foretell the future. To the Romans an omen could point either way, toward good fortune or bad, but the English adjective narrowed sharply over time to mean threatening or boding ill. It entered English in the late 1500s, and the modern spelling preserves the bare Latin root omen almost intact: think omen plus -ous, which is the surest way to avoid the common slip of inserting an extra letter and writing 'omnious'. The same omen still survives untouched in the noun we use today, and the word 'abominable' shares a tangled history with this family. Keeping the o-m-i-n sequence in mind, matching the noun omen, is the reliable guard against misspelling.

How the word is built

• omin- (from Latin omen: a sign or foreboding)
• -ous (adjective suffix: full of)