minatory

comparative more minatory · superlative most minatory · alternative obsolete miniatory

1. Threatening, menacing.

   Number 3, Lauriston Gardens wore an ill-omened and minatory look.

   1887, A[rthur] Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet”, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, London; New York, N.Y.: Ward, Lock & Co., part I (Being a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., […]), chapter III (The Lauriston Gardens Mystery), page 17

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   […]the Place de Grève, with its thirty thousand Regulars, its whole irregular Saint-Antoine and Saint-Marceau, is one minatory mass of clear or rusty steel;[…]

   1837, Thomas Carlyle, “Usher Maillard”, in The French Revolution: A History […], volume I (The Bastille), London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC, book VII (The Insurrection of Women), page 259

   […]her father quietly addressed a few words, by letter, to George Flack. This communication was not of a minatory order; it expressed on the contrary the loose sociability which was the essence of Mr. Dosson's nature.

   1888, Henry James, chapter 13, in The Reverberator, Macmillan and Co.

   She shook hands firmly with Dalgliesh and gave him a minatory glance as if welcoming a new patient from whom she expected trouble.

   1975, P. D. James, The Black Tower (Adam Dalgliesh; 5), New York: Faber & Faber, →ISBN, page 49

   In the cottage next to the post office Alma Crumble broke her wrist stirring batter, at which the Bug declared in a minatory tone that ‘That was enough of that.’

   1997 December 21, Edward Gorey, The Haunted Tea-Cosy: A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas, New York; San Diego; London: Harcourt Brace & Company, published 1997, →ISBN

   Synonyms: minacious, minatorial, ominous, sinister