premonition - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Noun
premonition (plural premonitions)
- A clairvoyant or clairaudient experience, such as a dream, which resonates with some event in the future.
- ✤ Synonym: vision
- A strong intuition that something is about to happen (usually something negative, but not exclusively).
- ✤ Synonyms: bad feeling, foreboding, gut feeling, hunch, (informal) second sight
- ✤ The sinister face of Dr. Bauerstein recurred to me unpleasantly. A vague suspicion of everyone and everything filled my mind. Just for a moment I had a premonition of approaching evil.1
Etymology
First use appears c. 1533. From Anglo-Norman premunition, from Ecclesiastical Latin praemonitiōnem (“a forewarning”), form of praemonitiō, from Latin praemonitus, past participle of praemoneō, from prae (“before”) (English pre-) + moneō (“to warn”) (from which English monitor).2 Compare Germanic forewarning.
Pronunciation
- IPA: /ˌpriːməˈnɪʃən/, /ˌprɛ-/
- Audio (Southern England): 🔊
- enPR: prĕm’ə-, prē’mə-nĭshʹən
- Rhymes: -ɪʃən
Printed 2026-07-27.
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