a. [f. FATE sb. + -FUL.]
1. Of a voice or utterance: Revealing the decrees of fate; prophetic of destiny.
1715–20. Pope, Iliad, XIX. 466.
| Then ceas’d for ever, by the Furies ty’d, | |
| His fate-full voice. |
1794. Coleridge, Melancholy.
| A mystic tumult and a fateful rhyme | |
| Mixt with wild shapings of the unborn time. |
1850. Carlyle, Latter-d. Pamph., i. (1872), 28. That fateful Hebrew Prophecy.
1863. Longf., Wayside Inn, II., Prel., 102.
| And heard amid the mist below, | |
| Like voices of distress and pain, | |
| That haunt the thoughts of men insane, | |
| The fateful cawings of the crow. |
1878. B. Taylor, Deukalion, II. v. 84.
| Bright Earth! The echo of the fateful words: | |
| ‘Rise, Brother!’ scarce in twilight Hades dies, | |
| And I behold thee! |
2. Fraught with destiny, bearing with it or involving momentous consequences; decisive, important. Chiefly of a period of time.
1800. Coleridge, Death of Wallenstein, III. viii.
| A fateful evening doth descend upon us, | |
| And brings on their long night! |
1850. W. Irving, Mahomet, ix. (1853), 35. The fateful banner of Khaled.
1861. [Mrs. A. J. Penny], Romance Dull Life, xiii. 97. Each minute seemed fateful to her.
1884. Roe, Nature’s Serial Story, xii., in Harper’s Mag., LXIX., Nov., 907/1. While Burt was staring at his dismal, tangled future, seeing no solution of his difficulties, a fateful conference relating to him was taking place.
3. Marked by the influence of fate; controlled as if by irresistible destiny.
1876. S. A. Brooke, Eng. Lit., 130. The Bride of Lammermoor, as great in fateful pathos as Romeo and Juliet.
1885. Pall Mall G., 17 Feb., 6/2. That fateful inability to review their position.
1891. Times, 14 Feb., 7/5. Peasants … begin … their … wanderings from place to place in an aimless, fateful sort of way.
1891. E. Peacock, Narcissa Brendon, I. 229. As fateful as a Greek tragedy.
4. Bringing fate or death; deadly; = FATAL 6.
1764. J. Grainger, The Sugar Cane, IV. 174. Nor fateful only is the bursting flame.
1798. Canning & Hammond, The Progress of Man, in Anti-Jacobin, No. 16.
| Twangs the bent bow—resounds the fateful dart | |
| Swift-wing’d, and trembles in a porker’s heart. |
1808. J. Barlow, The Columbiad, IV. 316.
| Let the poor guardless natives never feel | |
| The flamen’s fraud, the soldier’s fateful steel. |
5. Having a remarkable fate; of eventful history.
1886. G. T. Stokes, Ireland & Celtic Church (1888), 108, note. This fateful book is said to be still in existence.
Hence Fatefully adv., in a fateful manner. Fatefulness, the quality of being fateful.
1863. S. Hibberd, in Intell. Observer, III. 439. if she [the bee] is so fatefully mechanical as to build and furnish a cell without knowledge of what it is.
1865. Carlyle, Fredk. Gt., XVII. iii. Those fatefully questionable months.
1882. Pall Mall G., 1 Dec., 3. Assigning much mock fatefulness to Sir Crimson Fluid.
1886. Athenæum, 20 Feb., 274/2. Mr. Barrymore imparts to Belvawney a whimsical air of fatefulness.
