0 to be a sign that something bad is likely to happen in the future:
It was a deeply superstitious country, where earthquakes were commonly believed to portend the end of dynasties.
1 to be a sign that something is likely to happen in the future:
All that portends a continuing outgoing of these methods of civil defence.
We may have very different views about what people's sympathies or political views portend.
This proposal as has been pointed out, portends the curtailment of education services on grounds of false economy.
It is certainly not my belief that there is any portending difficulty in this matter, either constitutionally or voluntarily.
In this way, tolerance is 'an index of this very capacity for mixing and of the perceived threat to a social norm that it portends' (p. 73).
And that does not portend well for the practicality of a hyperreal wager.
Having a past shared history does not necessarily portend a common fate for us far into the future.
The transubstantiation is startling in its ambition and in the possibility for the fundamental resetting of the social hierarchy that it portends.
