ponderous
adjective
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The Serious History of Ponderous
Ponderous is ultimately from the Latin word for "weight," namely, "pondus" (which also gave us "ponder" and "preponderance" and is related to "pound"). We adopted "ponderous" with the literal sense "heavy" from Anglo-French ponderus in the 15th century, and early on we appended a figurative sense of "weighty," that is, "serious" or "important." But we stopped using the "serious" sense of "ponderous" around 200 years ago - perhaps because in the meantime we'd imposed on it a different figurative sense of "dull and lifeless," which we still use today.
Synonyms
Examples of ponderous in a Sentence
Alison Willmore, Vulture, 7 Sep. 2024
Clint Mansell’s score is the driving force behind this ponderous movie’s mysterious aura, with a pair of unlikely collaborators that reflect the movie’s tonal soup.
—Indiewire Staff, IndieWire, 14 Aug. 2024
The world is not likely to see a return to the large-scale, ponderous, and protocol-heavy diplomacy of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogues of the past, no matter how productive Biden and Xi’s conversation is.
—Danny Russel, Foreign Affairs, 14 Nov. 2021
The episodes are dense and well-paced; this is not a ponderous artistic experiment, though the tightness of its construction speaks to a care for the craft of TV-making.
—Vogue, 19 July 2024
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Dictionary Entries Near ponderous
Cite this Entry
“Ponderous.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ponderous. Accessed 26 Nov. 2024.
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ponderous
adjective
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