baleful
/ˈbeɪlfʊl
/ /ˈbeɪlf(ə)l/adjective
1Threatening harm; menacing: Bill shot a baleful glance in her direction...
- If it's possible to cast a baleful glance with one eye shut, then she did it.
- She wiped at it furtively, casting a baleful glance around to see if anyone noticed.
- Zack buried his head in her shoulder, pausing in the crying to give me a baleful glance or two, and to lob the occasional ‘I don't like you Daddy, you're a meanie.’
Synonyms
menacing, threatening, unfriendly, hostile, antagonistic, evil, evil-intentioned, wicked, nasty, hate-filled, bitter, acrimonious, malevolent, malicious, malignant, malign, sinister, deadly, harmful, injurious, dangerous, noxious, virulent, pernicious, venomous, poisonous, vitriolic, vindictive
literary malefic, maleficent
1.1Having a harmful or destructive effect: the baleful influence of Rasputin...
- The baleful effect of overwhelming electoral landslides, usually worse than suggested by the cube rule, has also been underplayed.
- Just for a moment you are swept by a sense of doubt - perhaps The Economist, that most sober of journals, is referring to the baleful effects of global warming.
- The second is the baleful effect of regulation.
Derivatives
balefully
/ adverb ...- Mum expressed this by huffing from room to room muttering about road deaths and glaring at me balefully, pausing to sigh ‘it's not that I don't trust you, love.’
- He once remarked balefully that ‘in England I am too much an American, and in America, too much an Englishman.’
- It is such a retro settlement that the working men's club glares balefully across Main Street at the Conservative club, like the post-industrial revolution never happened.
balefulness
- It is loathsome to think that balefulness of an unknown cause could create such a catastrophe.
- Continuous wars brought enormous balefulness to the people giving rise to wide opposition in the small states.
- But the balefulness of the act is hardly reduced thereby - and therefore my sentiments about the filth who carried out the deed remain essentially the same.