momentous
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Etymology tree
From moment (“weight, importance”) + -ous.
Pronunciation
[edit]Adjective
[edit]momentous (comparative more momentous, superlative most momentous)
- Outstanding in importance, of great consequence.
- 1725, Daniel Defoe, Everybody's Business is Nobody's Business:
- The reason why I did not publish this book till the end of the last sessions of parliament was, because I did not care to interfere with more momentous affairs.
- 1831, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter 31, in Homeward Bound:
- "It has been a momentous month, and I hope we shall all retain healthful recollections of it as long as we live."
- 1902, Joseph Conrad, chapter 3, in The End of the Tether:
- What to the other parties was merely the sale of a ship was to him a momentous event involving a radically new view of existence.
- 1952 December, R. C. Riley, “By Rail to Kemp Town”, in Railway Magazine, page 835:
- The last train ran on December 31, 1932, almost unnoticed, for it coincided with the running of the last steam passenger train down the main line from London to Brighton, a much more momentous event.
- 2007 July 1, Richard Dawkins, “Inferior Design”, in New York Times, retrieved 19 November 2013:
- Natural selection is arguably the most momentous idea ever to occur to a human mind, because it — alone as far as we know — explains the elegant illusion of design that pervades the living kingdoms and explains, in passing, us.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]of outstanding importance or great consequence
Anagrams
[edit]Categories:
- English terms suffixed with -ous
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *h₃ed- (smell)
- English 3-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- Rhymes:English/ɛntəs
- Rhymes:English/ɛntəs/3 syllables
- English lemmas
- English adjectives
- English terms with quotations