funest

comparative more funest · superlative most funest

1. archaicCausing death or disaster; fatal, catastrophic; deplorable, lamentable.

   Funest philosophers and ponderers, Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

   1922 (first published 1923-09-07), Wallace Stevens, Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds, from collection Harmonium

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   I do assure you, there is nothing I have a greater scorn and indignation against, than these wretched scoffers; and I look upon our neglect of severely punishing them as an high defect in our politics, and a forerunner of something very funest.

   1663 Sept 17th, John Evelyn in a letter to Dr. Pierce, published 1863 in Diary and correspondence of John Evelyn, F.R.S., volume 3, page 142

   Scarce had this unhappy Nation recover'd these funest disasters, when the abomination of Play-houses rose up in this land: From hence hath an inundation of Obscenity flow'd from the Court and overspread the Kingdom.

   1716 Nov 7th, quoted from 1742, probably Alexander Pope, God's Revenge Against Punning, from Miscellanies, 3rd volume, page 226

   c. 1810-1820, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notes on Jeremy Taylor …excepting only some Popes have be'en remarked by their own histories for funest and direful deaths.

   Flora, initially an ivory-pale, dark-haired funest beauty, whom the author transformed just in time into a third bromidic dummy with a dun bun.

   1969Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor, (Please provide the book title or journal name), Penguin, published 2011, page 264