(adjective) of, relating to, or constituting a portent / (adjective) eliciting amazement or wonder; prodigious / (adjective) being a grave or serious matter / (adjective) self-consciously solemn or important; pompous / (adjective) ponderously excessive
the extent that Williams' plays and Cocteau's films do suggest these portentous meanings
Throughout March, one portent after another had made the Armenians of north-west Syria apprehensive
She did clipped irony and she did sentences swelling with portent.
recommend various brands of portentous mysticism as the solution to human ills
Anything revelatory or portentous at the end of the story is very heavy indeed.
this portentous philosophical phrase or statement is not outside the work but inside it
on Damien Hirst's 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living'
In a portent to which they did not pay adequate attention, police reported that watching soldiers cheered the workers’ red banners
Hal's portentous "I am in here"
But the case is notable for the portentous and pedantic elaborations made by the arbitrator,
As she came to a particularly dramatic passage, where the hero was about to encounter some strange, perhaps fatal danger, her voice would slow down, her words would be spaced portentously
The notes scrawled in the margins in my loopy high school hand proclaim such portentous platitudes as “orgasm = death,”
It was the fate of those mild hills around the Thrale house to be portentous in the view of Edmund Tice.