Synonyms and Antonyms of direful
- the stock market crash was the first direful indication of the dark days to come
black, bleak, cheerless, chill, Cimmerian, cloudy, cold, comfortless, dark, darkening, depressing, depressive, desolate, dim, disconsolate, dismal, drear, dreary, dreich [chiefly Scottish], elegiac (also elegiacal), forlorn, funereal, gloomy, glum, godforsaken, gray (also grey), lonely, lonesome, lugubrious, miserable, morbid, morose, murky, plutonian, saturnine, sepulchral, somber (or sombre), sullen, sunless, tenebrific, tenebrous, wretched
discouraging, disheartening, hopeless, unfavorable, unpromising, unpropitious
ill-fated, ill-starred, star-crossed, troubled, unfortunate, unlucky
- heard the direful howling of the wolves during the night
daunting, demoralizing, disconcerting, discouraging, dismaying, disquieting, distressing, disturbing, perturbing, startling, threatening, troubling, trying, unnerving
bone-chilling, creepy, eerie (also eery), weird
appalling, atrocious, awful, grisly, gruesome (also grewsome), hideous, horrid, macabre, monstrous, nightmarish