balefulness


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bale·ful

 (bāl′fəl)
adj.
1. Portending evil; ominous: The guard's baleful glare frightened the children.
2. Harmful or malignant in intent or effect: a baleful influence.
[Middle English, from Old English bealoful : bealu, bale, evil + -ful, -ful; see -ful.]
bale′ful·ly adv.
bale′ful·ness n.
Usage Note: Baleful and baneful overlap in meaning, but baleful usually applies to something that is menacing or foreshadows evil: a baleful look. Baneful most often describes that which is actually harmful or destructive: baneful effects of their foreign policy.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:
Noun1.balefulness - the quality or nature of being harmful or evilbalefulness - the quality or nature of being harmful or evil
maleficence, mischief
evilness, evil - the quality of being morally wrong in principle or practice; "attempts to explain the origin of evil in the world"
Based on WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart collection. © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.
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'There she got into an environment that never gave anything else to anyone but disarray and suffering; where she, after having become a mother at the age of seventeen and having been exposed to immorality and suffered endless insults and torments, formed such ideas about life, which guaranteed that any future elation would invariably turn into balefulness for her.' (42) This environment was, according to Pasternak, inspired by Nietzsche and anarchy: 'The Tbilisi children of the coffee-house period'.
Georg von Charasoff: a neglected contributor to the classical-Marxian tradition
Like the rural peasants and island natives in whom the romantics likewise glimpsed a mode of rescue from the balefulness of modernity and the ravening of the modern mind, women seemed less prone to the abstractions that engender a crippling self-consciousness and self-division.
The empty eye and the full heart: Lin Fengmian's figure paintings and modernist tradition

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