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doom

nounverbphrasecommon in dialogue

  • //duːm//

Destiny, especially terrible.

noun

  1. 1

    Destiny, especially terrible.

    This, for the night; by day, the web and loom, / And homely houſhold-taſk, ſhall be her doom,

    "When should I expect him?" Roy said, resigned to his doom.

    We are legion. The time of our return is coming. Our numbers will darken the sky of every world. You cannot escape your doom.

    "After he takes the throne, you will be arrested." / "You lie like your master, Carfax. Your doom is sealed."

  2. 2

    An undesirable fate; an impending severe occurrence or danger that seems inevitable.

    unlike Vincent, he wasn't quite taken in by the outbreak of hopefulness on all sides. After all, nothing about the tanks or the process had been resolved; an air of doom still hung undisturbed over the project.

    Such paintings are inherently moody, and Elliott likes that-even as he carefully avoids dictating a specific mood. "Yesterday I painted the last light of the day-the trees looked pink, and the mountain's shadow was coming over them. It created a feeling of nostalgia... or impending doom... or still, quiet, peacefulness. It depends on the viewer's feelings about the scene, not just mine."

    Chung was the first of its four picks in Round 2. His arrival might spell doom for Rodney Harrison.

  3. 3

    Dread; a feeling of danger, impending danger, darkness, or despair.

    She halted her pacing steps as the ugly significance of Nicholas Caulfield's pending arrival washed over her. Ruin. Destitution. Doom settled like a heavy stone in her chest.

    Feeling doom, as we learned in the beautiful folk language of blacks who knew the truth of it, began with a single unexpected oddity — a redbird out of season, hail out of cloudless skies, dogs cowering under the house

    I'm taking medications every day; never thinking I would be spiraling into nothing but a nightmare that made me feel doom.

    Then the smiling narrator filled me with doom: I was expected to pull my own rip cord. I nearly fainted.

  4. 4

    obsoleteA law.

    "What ye will not that other men should do unto you, that do ye not unto other men." "From this one doom," comments Alfred, "a man may bethink him how he should judge every one rightly: he needs no other doombook."

  5. 5

    obsoleteA judgment or decision.

    And there he learned of things and haps to come, / To give foreknowledge true, and certain doom.

    But the day of doome shall be the end of this time, and the beginning of the immortality for to come, wherein corruption is past.

    Kings are spoken of as if they had a store of "Themistes" ready to hand for use; but it must be distinctly understood that they are not laws, but judgments, or, to take the exact Teutonic equivalent, "dooms."

    when Alfred in turn set himself to the task of stating and interpreting the law of his kingdom, there were already precedents for him to follow, in the written "dooms" (domas) of his predecessors, — themselves but a small portion of the still unwritten custom

  6. 6

    obsoleteA sentence or penalty for illegal behaviour.

    The first dooms of London provide especially the recovery of cattle belonging to the citizens.

    Appeals were by our ancient law styled falsing of dooms. They were to be entered immediately after doom or sentence was pronounced,

    The billiard sharp whom anyone catches / His doom’s extremely hard— / He’s made to dwell— / In a dungeon cell / On a spot that’s always barred.

  7. 7

    Death.

    They met an untimely doom when the mineshaft caved in.

    This is the day of doom for Bassianus.

    Harley got devoured by the undead / Lurking down in some old wizard's tomb / You can say there's no such thing as zombies / But that's how Harley Warren met his doom

    The engines were rumbling, missing every now and then, and Rachel leaned back in her seat, prepared to meet her doom somewhere over the Pacific. At least there was a priest at hand -- maybe she could entice him to hear a final confession.

  8. 8

    The Last Judgment; or, an artistic representation thereof.

Etymology

From Middle English doom, dom, from Old English dōm (“judgement”), from Proto-West Germanic *dōm, from Proto-Germanic *dōmaz, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰóh₁mos. Cognates Compare Dutch doem (“condemnation, doom; judgement”), Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, and Swedish dom (“judgement”), Faroese and Icelandic dómur (“judgement”), Gothic 𐌳𐍉𐌼𐍃 (dōms, “insight, judgement”); also Ancient Greek θωμός (thōmós, “heap”), Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, and Ukrainian ду́ма (dúma, “thought”), Polish duma (“pride”). Doublet of duma. See also deem.

verb

  1. 1

    To pronounce judgment or sentence on; to condemn.

    a criminal doomed to death

    Absolves the just, and dooms the guilty souls.

    There was certainly plenty of badass Arya before and after—more on that soon—but here was Arya the living, breathing human, outnumbered and petrified of making the one slight wrong move that would doom her.

  2. 2

    To destine; to fix irrevocably the ill fate of.

    A man of genius […] doomed to struggle with difficulties.

  3. 3

    obsoleteTo judge; to estimate or determine as a judge.

    And while we know not that the King of heaven hath not doomed this place our safe retreat

  4. 4

    obsoleteTo ordain as a penalty; hence, to mulct or fine.

    Have I tongue to doom my brother's death?

  5. 5

    archaicTo assess a tax upon, by estimate or at discretion.

  6. 6

    To be extremely pessimistic about something.

    Every time I see people dooming over North America I just assume its because they've never seen the parts of it that look like this

    You can tell why Democrats were dooming like two months ago

    Earlier today I wanted to doom about Gemini 3.1 Pro completely failing ARC-AGI-3.

phrase

  1. 1

    Variant of didn't organizeInitialism of didn't organize, only moved; used in compounds designating a miscellaneous collection of items which one has failed to properly organize.

    I tried to organize my stuff but just ended up making a big doom pile.

    One day in April of 2021, Lindsey Bee decided it was time to deal with the laundry "doom piles" that had formed around her house. So she did what many people do when faced with a boring task. She turned to TikTok.

    While digital clutter may not be physical, like the "doom piles" and junk drawers in your home, the anxiety and distress it induces is real, said Kerry Lakey, a lecturer in psychology at Northumbria University in England, who studies behavior around digital data.

    DOOM piles are a cleaning tactic and a way of reducing visual clutter. Essentially, it's stashing random items that need to be organized in one place, to be dealt with later. We all have DOOM piles — a junk drawer or a place where we put piles of clutter before guests visit. There can be DOOM piles, DOOM bags, DOOM boxes, or one of my son's favorites, a DOOM desk.

Forms

plural
dooms
past tense
doomed
past participle
doomed
present participle
dooming
third person singular
dooms
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).