Crossword clue
Portend crossword clue
13 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "portend", from as short as 4 letters up to 13, grouped below by the length of your slot.
Written by Blake Boege
Answers by length
Everything below fits the clue. What separates them is length, running from 4 letters to 13, so find your row and ignore the rest.
| Letters | Answers |
|---|---|
| 4 |
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| 5 |
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| 7 |
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| 8 |
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| 9 |
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| 10 |
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| 13 |
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What this list looks like
Most of them are 8 letters long: 4 of the 13 sit in that row.
At 4 letters you have BODE and OMEN, and short answers like these turn up far more often than their share of the dictionary suggests.
The list mixes 11 synonyms with 2 examples of the thing itself.
Which one does the setter mean?
Four squares is BODE, as in bodes ill, and it is the most common answer here. OMEN also fits four but is the sign itself rather than the act of signifying, so the clue's part of speech decides between them.
How these differ
These all mean to be a sign of something coming and differ in who is doing the signifying. BODE, BETOKEN and PRESAGE are things themselves warning of what follows, and carry no claim that anyone predicted it. AUGUR is from Roman divination, where the augur read the flight of birds, and is now used both ways: it augurs well. FORETELL, PREDICT, FORECAST and PROGNOSTICATE are people making claims about the future, and the last is the most pompous available. THREATEN is the version where what is coming is definitely bad.
Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have
Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.
Where these answers come from
This is a dictionary answering a question, not a copied answer key. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “portend” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. Moby Thesaurus lists 11 of them too. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.
Common questions
- What is the answer to the crossword clue "portend"?
- There is more than one. 13 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Four squares is BODE, as in bodes ill, and it is the most common answer here. OMEN also fits four but is the sign itself rather than the act of signifying, so the clue's part of speech decides between them.
- How many letters is the answer to "portend"?
- Anything from 4 to 13. The length with the most candidates is 8. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.
- How reliable are these answers?
- 11 of the 13 appear in two independently compiled reference works, WordNet and Moby Thesaurus, rather than one. All of them are in the 173,000-word dictionary this site searches. None of them comes from any published puzzle.