Presentiment

//prɪˈzɛn.tɪ.mənt// noun

noun ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A premonition; a feeling that something, often of undesirable nature, is going to happen.

    "A man, my good Sir, has seldom an offer of kindness to make to a woman, but she has a presentiment of it some moments before."

  2. 2
    a feeling of evil to come wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
forebodingbodingfeelingforebodingforefeelingpremonition

Example

More examples

""And now comes the strangest part of the affair. What do you suppose was above the murdered man?" I felt a creeping of the flesh, and a presentiment of coming horror, even before Sherlock Holmes answered. "The word RACHE, written in letters of blood," he said."

Etymology

From French pressentiment, from Middle French, equivalent to pre- + sentiment.

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