Word of the Day

Saturday, March 25, 2000

augury

\AW-gyuh-ree\ , noun;

The art or practice of foretelling events; divination.

An omen; prediction; prognostication; indication of the future.

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Quotes:

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

Origin:

Augury is from Latin augurium, from augur, a soothsayer.