1A daughter of the Trojan king Priam. She was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but when she cheated him, he turned this into a curse by causing her prophecies, though true, to be disbelieved.

1. 1.1as noun a Cassandra A prophet of disaster, especially one who is disregarded.
   Example sentencesExamples

   • The economics correspondents and all us other Cassandras might as well be voices crying in the wilderness.
   • After all, the Cassandras have been wrong with their forecasts of imminent disaster plenty of times in the past.
   • True to form, the conventional Cassandras are declaring the end of the new economy and forecasting widespread economic disaster.
   • Now is certainly not the time to play into the hands of Cassandras who fill our media with the molten lead of cultural defeatism.
   • Environmentalists are often seen as prophets of doom, and nobody much likes or believes Cassandras.
   • What made our upset that day all the more profound and awful, in addition to our horror at the massacre and our anger at the perpetrators, was the knowledge that for years we had all been Cassandras.
   • While being a high-level executive, who probably knew all the relevant facts, he was apparently one of the in-house Cassandras who knew the place was a house of cards and started ringing the alarm bell, at least on the inside.
   • Let's hope the mainstream turns out to be right, not the Cassandras.
   • Everybody said that the fisheries biologists were Cassandras but they were right: cod collapsed and in one day 35000 Canadian fishermen lost their jobs and they do not have them back.
   • They lived in no man's land, homeless Cassandras producing their bulletins or little magazines in small back rooms, forming splinter groups without influence.
   • Several Cassandras try in vain to make their prophetic voices heard, but everyone is deaf.
   • I do not wish to sound like a Cassandra (a word that may appear biased because it suggests a fearful female), so I will not despair.
   • The authors in this issue are neither Cassandras nor Pollyannas in their assessments and proposals.
   • The history of the oil industry in the North Sea is full of Cassandras prophesying the miserable day when the wells run dry.
   • It might well be that the critics are right, but it's pretty hard to tell based on the conflicting and often panicky pronouncements of the education Cassandras.

   Synonyms

   clairvoyant, fortune teller, prophet, seer, soothsayer, forecaster of the future, crystal gazer, astrologer, prognosticator, prophesier, oracle, augur, sibyl, mind reader, palmist, palm reader, chiromancer, medium, telepathist, spiritualist, spiritist