How to Use foreboding in a Sentence

foreboding

1 of 2 noun
  • She was filled with a sense of foreboding.
  • It seems that her forebodings were justified.
  • The day was a patchwork of the hopeful and the foreboding.
    New York Times, 8 May 2022
  • But this was just a foreboding of what was to come in 1854.
    Gordon S. Wood, WSJ, 25 Sep. 2020
  • Most of the foreboding black lines were stacked like checkers around the pump.
    Deirdre Mask, Time, 14 Apr. 2020
  • But the unease and the sense of foreboding were never far off.
    Mary Costello, The New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2023
  • There might be even more foreboding in the report of Tyler Eifert’s surgery than at first meets the eye.
    Profootballdoc, sandiegouniontribune.com, 12 Oct. 2017
  • The soundtrack's foreboding and the stares very sullen, which is all to say, you will be unnerved.
    Jill Krasny, Esquire, 14 May 2015
  • But in other parts of town, there was a sense of foreboding — as there always is at this time of the year.
    Dahleen Glanton, chicagotribune.com, 7 May 2018
  • The sounds could be heard as flashbacks or as forebodings.
    Alex Ross, The New Yorker, 24 June 2018
  • With more protests scheduled for Sunday, the sense of foreboding was inescapable across much of the city.
    BostonGlobe.com, 6 Oct. 2019
  • Any story about a girl in the woods is replete with foreboding.
    Maria Garcia, latimes.com, 25 June 2019
  • But there was no denying that the lighting down there was a foreboding red.
    Sarah Todd, Quartz, 21 Jan. 2020
  • The lure is La Cité, a 10th-century citadel both fairy-tale and foreboding.
    Katherine Wheelock, Condé Nast Traveler, 9 June 2017
  • The snowy landscape serves as a tense and foreboding setting.
    Joyce Bautista Ferrari, Marie Claire, 28 Nov. 2019
  • All the chaos, all the confusion, all the gloomy foreboding is what prompted me to bring my self-care props to campus.
    Whitney Phillips, Wired, 3 Feb. 2020
  • The landscape was gorgeous but also foreboding, and the hike wasn’t easy.
    Anya Yurchyshyn, refinery29.com, 11 May 2018
  • But turning a home’s back to the sun can make the interior dark and foreboding.
    Richard A. Marini, ExpressNews.com, 7 Oct. 2019
  • Well, that’s certainly a foreboding vision for what’s to come in the next season of Riverdale.
    Kara Nesvig, Teen Vogue, 16 May 2019
  • Woods had just bogeyed the fifth and double bogeyed the short sixth, and his countenance was as foreboding as the clouds out to sea.
    Rob Hodgetts, CNN, 18 July 2019
  • That sense of foreboding didn’t seem to fluster Frammy Figueroa, the class speaker.
    R.j. Rico, The Seattle Times, 12 July 2017
  • At the time, the news was curious and foreboding, but also in dispute.
    cincinnati.com, 17 Mar. 2020
  • Anyone who knows anything about the Romanovs should feel a twinge of foreboding.
    Caroline Hallemann, Town & Country, 27 Oct. 2018
  • Yet the foreboding of the dumpster-fire paintings seems to have followed Krazy into Eden, where the cat is sometimes trailed by a snake.
    Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 31 Mar. 2023
  • The news that has come across our telegraph desk over the weekend is fraught with disaster and the dire foreboding of more dreadful events to come.
    Johnny Miller, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Jan. 2018
  • The tone of this section is one where the feelings of ennui are offset by tension brought on by a great sense of foreboding.
    Michael Heaton, cleveland.com, 27 Apr. 2018
  • As Wyda made her plaintive phone calls, the first grim foreboding of what was ahead for the nursing home appeared.
    Glenn Garvin, miamiherald, 22 Sep. 2017
  • The barren landscape — the soil is too sulfurous for plants — and the shifting mists lent the entire scene a Kurosawa-like foreboding.
    Eva Sohlman, New York Times, 7 Oct. 2019
  • Thoughtful, precise, and filled with foreboding, Blood on Her Name is a pulp-noir thriller of the highest caliber.
    Isaac Feldberg, Fortune, 28 Feb. 2020
  • Or is the point here to simply marvel at the general sense of fatal foreboding that seems to be in the very soil of Castle Rock?
    refinery29.com, 13 July 2018
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foreboding

2 of 2 adjective
  • The blue app with the cheery white bird became a foreboding black square with a white letter X.
    The Salt Lake Tribune, 28 Aug. 2023
  • The theme of this year’s event is a foreboding term from academia: polycrisis.
    Tristan Bove, Fortune, 17 Jan. 2023
  • The match got out to a foreboding start for Orlando City.
    Julia Poe, orlandosentinel.com, 29 Nov. 2020
  • The icy ocean around Antarctica may seem like a cold and foreboding place.
    Chelsea Harvey, Scientific American, 27 Oct. 2020
  • But there’s a more foreboding side to the monument too.
    Rachel Schnalzer, Los Angeles Times, 20 Oct. 2022
  • The notch in the cloud's base was a distinctive and foreboding clef-like formation.
    Washington Post, 6 July 2021
  • Even more foreboding is the tally of twenty-one people who are marked as dead.
    Michael Luo, The New Yorker, 28 Jan. 2022
  • The foreboding silhouette of bare branches and ravens in flight turn bright green in the dead of night due to their special design.
    Zee Krstic, Good Housekeeping, 16 Sep. 2022
  • Its foreboding music and non sequitur lyrics were off-putting to critics and fans at first.
    Neil Shah, WSJ, 26 Sep. 2020
  • These dark, foreboding clouds form on the leading edge of storms when their cool downdrafts are met by warm, humid air.
    Washington Post, 18 Aug. 2020
  • The bedlam comes fast and furious, and maybe that’s enough to distract us from the foreboding setting.
    Luke Winkie, Vulture, 3 Sep. 2021
  • Luzon says at the top of the clip (above), after the witches sing a foreboding chant before bursting into a wicked song.
    Joey Nolfi, EW.com, 20 Apr. 2021
  • When the Von Erich brothers reach the height of their powers, throwaway shots of pills and syringes lend a foreboding poignancy to the proceedings.
    Thomas Floyd, Washington Post, 19 Dec. 2023
  • Swirls of brown mud cake the lower walls of the home and tree roots infest the foundation of Brian Redfern’s evocative and foreboding set.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 23 May 2022
  • The basic plot is that of a foreboding dream—walls closing in, beast poised to pounce—from which the dreamer awakes just before catastrophe strikes.
    Andrew Delbanco, The New York Review of Books, 3 Nov. 2020
  • The first foreboding signs came when it was revealed that Ocean’s set wouldn’t be live-streamed on the official Coachella YouTube channel.
    Jon Blistein, Rolling Stone, 17 Apr. 2023
  • The result is a tragic story with a foreboding sense of despair along with a streak of dark humor running through it.
    cleveland, 21 Feb. 2021
  • Bruckner is content to create a foreboding atmosphere (the house helps) and let the dread creep over us.
    Bill Goodykoontz, Detroit Free Press, 20 Aug. 2021
  • Most people would feel fear and foreboding, but for Kelly Gallagher, the feeling is one of freedom.
    Aleks Klosok, CNN, 13 June 2020
  • In the foreboding clip, a seismometer measures big disturbances in the ground.
    Althea Legaspi, Rolling Stone, 3 Dec. 2023
  • In the foreboding trailer, black birds circle the sky as Macbeth emerges through an unsettling fog.
    Althea Legaspi, Rolling Stone, 21 Sep. 2021
  • The series of 68 tweets drew readers in with details about Linda's life, as well as foreboding moments about her last day.
    Gayane Keshishyan Mendez, CBS News, 15 Oct. 2021
  • Ryan saw the reaction his father received and gave a foreboding smirk.
    Nick Romano, EW.com, 3 Aug. 2022
  • The show cuts from this foreboding scene to one of her standing in a luminous field with Caesar (Aaron Pierre), a man enslaved on the same plantation.
    Hannah Giorgis, The Atlantic, 14 May 2021
  • In the end, the sensation is the same: a foreboding feeling of pervasive, imminent risk.
    Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 26 Feb. 2022
  • For the first six months of the pandemic this was a matter of some academic interest—and more than a little foreboding.
    The Economist, 23 Mar. 2021
  • Large majorities in polls say that the country is on the wrong track, a foreboding indicator for the party in power.
    Jonathan Martin, New York Times, 3 Nov. 2021
  • Clad in crimson, the foreboding figure rides toward the viewer’s left on a white skeleton, facing the viewer and crawling on all fours.
    Natasha Gural, Forbes, 30 Aug. 2021
  • The Longhorns needed some help late from the referees to escape Houston, which was a foreboding sign for life without Ewers.
    J. Brady McCollough, Los Angeles Times, 24 Oct. 2023
  • This French show starts strong with a foreboding atmosphere and some chilling sequences.
    WIRED, 24 Oct. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'foreboding.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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