Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Augur ill for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's entry is "augur ill" — a phrasal verb, pronounced /ˈɔːɡə ɪl/, with the stress on "au".
Narrator: To augur ill is to be a bad sign for the future — the delay augurs ill for the launch.
Narrator: In plain English, augur ill means something looks like a warning of trouble ahead.
Narrator: Its root is ancient prophecy — Latin "augur", a Roman priest who read omens from birds' flight.
Narrator: Rome took augury seriously — no major decision was made without consulting the augurs' signs.
Narrator: English kept the verb's formal, slightly literary register — augur ill rarely appears in casual chat.
Narrator: It always needs "ill" or "well" attached — you cannot simply "augur" something without the adverb.
Narrator: Financial and political writing favours it — the figures augur ill for next quarter.
Narrator: So remember: augur ill borrows a Roman priest's warning — a formal way to say the signs look bad.
Speaker A: A financial columnist wrote that falling orders "augur ill" for the company. That felt oddly poetic for a business article!
Speaker B: It genuinely is poetic in origin! AUGUR ILL borrows from ancient Rome — an "augur" was a priest who predicted the future by watching birds fly. Business writing keeps this ancient prophecy verb purely for its gravity.
Speaker A: So using it deliberately makes the warning sound more serious?
Speaker B: Exactly — "this looks bad" is plain; "this augurs ill" sounds weighty and considered, borrowing thousands of years of prophetic authority for one sentence!
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "The falling sales figures augur ill for the new product"; "such silence augurs ill for the negotiations"; "the early reviews augur ill for the film" — business, diplomacy, and cinema.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: "Augur" alone needs its adverb — you can't say "this augurs" and stop; it must augur ILL or augur WELL. And don't confuse AUGUR the verb with AUGER the drilling tool — same sound, totally different word!
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: "Bode ill" the closest twin, "portend" formal and ominous, "foreshadow" the literary cousin, "spell trouble" the everyday phrase. Augur ill keeps the ancient Roman gravity!
Speaker B: Let's use "augur ill" in AI prompts — a memorable way to ask for early-warning signals in data.
Speaker A: So augur ill in a prompt means flag signs of coming trouble?
Speaker B: Right. For a business dashboard, you'd write:
Prompt: Flag any metric that augurs ill for next quarter — falling signups, rising churn, or slowing revenue growth — with a clear warning banner on the dashboard.
Speaker A: Good — what about project risk tracking?
Speaker B: The risk prompt:
Prompt: Highlight project signals that augur ill for the deadline — repeated delays, unresolved blockers, or shrinking test coverage — in a weekly risk summary.
Speaker A: Customer health scoring?
Speaker B: The churn prompt:
Prompt: Score each customer account for signs that augur ill for renewal, such as declining logins and unanswered support tickets, sorted worst first.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: The monitoring prompt:
Prompt: Build an alert that fires when server metrics augur ill for an outage — rising latency plus falling memory — before the system actually fails.
Speaker A: Augur ill always means catching the warning before the disaster.
Speaker B: Exactly — say augur ill, and the AI hunts for early signals, not just current problems.
Augur ill — meaning in Arabic & definition More A courses GL Dictionary