Meaning & use
doom
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Meanings
noununcountable
A bad end or fate that seems impossible to avoid, especially death or ruin.
Grammar: Uncountable: a sense of doom, not a doom.
Patterns
- a sense of doom
- meet your doom
- impending doom
A feeling of doom settled over the camp.
The hero rode toward his doom without fear.
The storm clouds seemed to promise doom.
verbtransitive
To make something certain to fail or suffer an unpleasant end.
Grammar: Usually passive or with a to-phrase: doomed to fail.
Patterns
- doom someone to something
- be doomed to do something
- doom something to failure
A weak foundation doomed the building from the start.
The injury doomed her chances of winning.
They were doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
nounsingulararchaicreligion
The final judgment or fate of a person or thing, in older or religious language.
Grammar: Appears in old texts and fixed phrases such as crack of doom.
Patterns
- the day of doom
Old stories speak of the Day of Doom, when all would be judged.
The judge pronounced the doom of the condemned.
Word forms
| third person singular | dooms |
|---|---|
| past tense | doomed |
| past participle | doomed |
| -ing form | dooming |
Common combinations
- sense of doom
- A sense of doom filled the room as the results arrived.
- impending doom
- She felt impending doom before the exam.
- doom and gloom
- The news was all doom and gloom.
- meet your doom
- In the old legend, the thief met his doom in the cave.
- seal someone's doom
- That final mistake sealed the team's doom.
Synonyms and how they differ
- destruction
- Destruction is the act or result of being ruined, but doom stresses the sense that ruin is already fixed.
- fate
- Fate is neutral and can be good or bad, whereas doom is almost always disastrous.
- ruin
- Ruin is the state of being wrecked, while doom is the unavoidable fate that leads there.
- damnation
- Damnation is a strictly religious word for eternal punishment, a narrower sense of doom.
Opposites
Word family
- doomed adjective
- certain to fail or be destroyed
- doomsday noun
- the day of final destruction
- doomsayer noun
- a person who predicts disaster
- doomy adjective
- gloomy and threatening (informal)
Commonly confused: doom or dome?
doom vs dome
A dome is a rounded roof. It sounds very similar to doom but is spelled with e and means a shape, not a fate.
Practice
Which sentence uses doom as a verb correctly?
Choose one answer.
Doomed is the past form of the transitive verb doom, meaning made certain to fail. The other options misuse the noun or the verb form.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “doom”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.