Portentive

adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    portentous; prophetic; acting as a presage.

    "The raven, from a neighbouring oak, responded the portentive croak."

  2. 2
    Indicating that something is likely to happen in the future.

    "The potential portentive forms, consisting of the potential stem plus the post-clitic -noko, occur with a further post-cliticised contracted form of ylvk 'having said', the perfect participle of 'say', in a clause of negative purpose."

Example

More examples

"The raven, from a neighbouring oak, responded the portentive croak."

Etymology

From portent + -ive.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.