''baleful'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260813235252-00-⌔

baleful - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

baleful (comparative more baleful, superlative most baleful)

• Portending evil; ominous.
  • ✤ Synonyms: foreboding, portentous; see also Thesaurus: ominous
  • ✤ The street-lamps burn amid the baleful glooms,
    Amidst the soundless solitudes immense
    Of ranged mansions dark and still as tombs.¹
  • ✤ According to them all sorcerers, necromancers and evil-doers were born under the baleful influence of the seventh calendic sign[.]²
  • ✤ […] he went off alone with his family, and, watched by the day’s red baleful eye, pumped the pump-car homeward, […]³
  • ✤ I learned the speech of birds; now every tree
    Screams out to me a baleful prophecy.⁴
  • ✤ Few people cast a more baleful shadow over postwar Britain than Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper”, who has died aged 74⁵
  • ✤ 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.⁶
• (obsolete) Miserable, wretched, distressed, suffering.
  • ✤ Thou balefull Messenger, out of my sight:⁷
  • ✤ round he throws his baleful eyes, that witnessed huge affliction and dismay […]⁸
• (obsolete) Deadly, mortal.
  • ✤ Synonyms: fatal, lethal, terminal
  • ✤ With balefull weedes, and precious Iuiced flowers,/The earth that’s Natures mother, is her Tombe,⁹
  • ✤ 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.¹⁰

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: /ˈbeɪl.fəl/
• Audio (Southern England): 🔊

Printed 2026-08-13.

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Footnotes

1. 1873, James Thomson (B.V.), The City of Dreadful Night: ↩

2. 1936, Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art, London: Long, page 186: ↩

3. 1938, Xavier Herbert, chapter XII, in Capricornia ‎${}^{[1]}$, New York: D. Appleton-Century, published 1943, page 194: ↩

4. 1949, Naomi Replansky, “Complaint of the Ignorant Wizard” in Ring Song (published 1952): ↩

5. 2020 November 13, Duncan Campbell, “Peter Sutcliffe obituary”, in The Guardian ‎${}^{[2]}$: ↩

6. 2023 September 2, Simon Schama, “The real Rino”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 2: ↩

7. 1591 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Sixt, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies. […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act III, scene ii], line 48: ↩

8. 1667, John Milton, “Book I”, in Paradise Lost. […], London: […] [Samuel Simmons], and are to be sold by Peter Parker […]; [a] nd by Robert Boulter […]; [a] nd Matthias Walker, […], →OCLC; republished as Paradise Lost in Ten Books: […], London: Basil Montagu Pickering […], 1873, →OCLC, line 56: ↩

9. 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: ↩

10. 1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, London: Longmans, Green and Co., page 14: ↩