Word of the Day Archive
Saturday March 25, 2000
augury \AW-gyuh-ree\ , noun:
1. The art or practice of foretelling events; divination.
2. An omen; prediction; prognostication; indication of the future.
But if Sligo seemed the eternal moment, the farms at Thomastown, with their seventeen bickering tenants, recalcitrant income and occasional violent incidents, represented a closer augury of the future.
-- R. F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. 1
Mr. Lee's new book, "A Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War," is a bleak monument to a conflict that is remembered now mainly as an augury of World War II.
-- Verlyn Klinkenborg, "One Poet's War", New York Times, July 25, 1993
Augury is from Latin augurium, from augur, a soothsayer.
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for augury
