Minatory
adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Threatening, menacing.
"[T]he Place de Greve, with its thirty thousand Regulars, its whole irregular Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, is one minatory mass of clear or rusty steel […]"
- 1 threatening or foreshadowing evil or tragic developments wordnet
Example
More examples"[T]he Place de Greve, with its thirty thousand Regulars, its whole irregular Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, is one minatory mass of clear or rusty steel […]"
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French minatoire, from Late Latin minātōrius, from Latin minor, minārī (“to threaten, speak or act menacingly, hold out the threat of”, verbal derivative of minae, plural only, "threats, menaces, portents of evil") + -tōrius, deverbal adjective suffix originally forming derivatives from agent nouns ending in -tōr-, -tor; minae probably, if originally "projecting points, overhang," noun derivative of the verbal base *men- seen in ēminēre (“to stick out, protrude”), of uncertain origin. Cognate to menace.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.