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/fɚˈbɪdɪŋ/ · adjective
Appearing to be threatening, unfriendly or potentially unpleasant..
What cause, cry’d he, can justify our flight, To tempt the dangers of forbidding night?
[…] he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.
With no great disparity between them in point of years, they were, in every other respect, as unlike and far removed from each other as two men could well be. The one was soft-spoken, delicately made, precise, and elegant; the other, a burly square-built man, negligently dressed, rough and abrupt in manner, stern, and, in his present mood, forbidding both in look and speech.
The writer of the “blank” letter begins fluently with the date and “Dear Mary,” and then sits and chews his penholder or makes little dots and squares and circles on the blotter—utterly unable to attack the cold, forbidding blankness of that first page.
As we breasted the first summit, the precipitous mass of the Raven's Rock, towering some 250 ft. above the railway, looked grim and forbidding in the failing light, and distant Ben Wyves was shrouded in mist.
Its forbidding brick and concrete exterior looms over a vast, windswept brick plaza in a style architectural critics, not without admiration, call “The New Brutalism.”
1920, St. John G. Ervine, The Foolish Lovers, London: W. Collins & Sons, Chapter 3, VIII, p. 228, All law was composed of hindrances and obstacles and forbiddings, and therefore he was entirely opposed to Law.
But all these poor forbiddings could not stay him;
Use forbidding when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Forbidding means Appearing to be threatening, unfriendly or potentially unpleasant..
Common synonyms include bleak, frosty, grim, uninviting.
Possible antonyms include approachable, inviting, welcoming.
What cause, cry’d he, can justify our flight, To tempt the dangers of forbidding night?
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