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The bale of baleful comes from Old English bealu ("evil"), and the bane of the similar-looking baneful comes from Old English bana ("slayer" or "murderer"). Baleful and baneful are alike in meaning as well as appearance, and they are sometimes used in quite similar contexts—but they usually differ in emphasis. Baleful typically describes what threatens or portends evil (e.g., "a baleful look," "baleful predictions"). Baneful applies typically to what causes evil or destruction (e.g., "a baneful secret," "the baneful bite of the serpent"). Both words are used to modify terms like influence, effect, and result, and in such uses there is little that distinguishes them.
Examples of baleful in a Sentence
Gregory Fried, Foreign Affairs, 17 Oct. 2014
Its baleful guitar and hackneyed vocals make the average doubts shared by everyone who has ever been in love seem generic.
—Will Dukes, Rolling Stone, 25 Apr. 2025
Women are thought of as contaminants in the heya and arm candy outside it; the sponsors exert a baleful commercial pressure on the fighters.
—Jesse Green, New York Times, 6 Mar. 2025
The effect is to rub our faces in the self-destructive horror of the heroine’s impulses and to shift that baleful sense of the erotic’s dark power from a disturbing subtext to a more sensationalized foreground.
—Jim Shepard, New York Times, 12 Feb. 2025
See All Example Sentences for baleful
Cite this Entry
“Baleful.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/baleful. Accessed 29 May. 2025.
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