adjective
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harmful, menacing, or vindictive
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archaic dejected
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of baleful
before 1000; Middle English; Old English bealofull. See bale 2, -ful
Explanation
Baleful means the foreshadowing of tragic or evil events. If no one's listening in class and your teacher reprimands you with a baleful glance, expect a pop quiz. If your car breaks down and you take refuge in a deserted mansion, you might huddle under a dusty blanket and find yourself thinking that the wind moaning at the windows sounds baleful — maybe it's really the voice of a young woman murdered in the very bed where you sleep?
Vocabulary lists containing baleful
The Vocabulary.com Top 1000
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"The Odyssey" by Homer, Books 1–7
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100 SAT Words Beginning with "B"
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In the meantime, the tower's 400,000-euro outdoor LED screen has been turned off for months after online memes re-imagined it as the baleful eye of Sauron's fortress of Barad-dur from "The Lord of the Rings".
From Barron's ● Jul. 17, 2026
There’s plenty of blame to go around for these baleful developments.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 30, 2025
That’s the crux of horror flick “Good Boy,” in which Indy the retriever detects a baleful force that his human can’t see.
From Salon ● Oct. 3, 2025
The details of Knight's upbringing were not disclosed in court, but Judge Richardson described them as "baleful".
From BBC ● Sep. 5, 2025
Polly flared his crest and stared at me with a baleful jaundiced eye as I puffed up.
From "The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate" by Jacqueline Kelly
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Get a wordDefinitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
