auspicious
- 1Suggesting or favorable to future success; giving a sign that things will go well.
The film's sold-out opening weekend was an auspicious debut for the young director.
Losing the keys before we had even left the driveway was hardly an auspicious beginning to the road trip.
UsageUsually about beginnings: an auspicious start, an auspicious debut. Not an auspicious start means things began badly.
Similarpromising, favorable, propitious, encouraging, bright
Oppositeinauspicious, unpromising, unfavorable, ominous
- 2Marked by success and good fortune; prosperous.
The company looked back on an auspicious decade in which its profits tripled.
During the queen's long and auspicious reign, trade and the arts flourished.
Oppositeunfortunate, unlucky, unsuccessful
Note
Here the success has already arrived: an auspicious reign or decade is a prosperous one, judged looking back rather than forward. Fielding's Tom Thumb (1730) hails "this auspicious day", and Shakespeare's Hamlet pairs "one auspicious and one dropping eye": a glad eye beside a weeping one, joy and grief at the same occasion.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 5 facts
- Henry Fielding wrote Tom Thumb. d.lib.rochester.edu
- Tom Thumb was first published in 1730. openlibrary.org
- Tom Thumb contains 'this auspicious day'; Doodle speaks the words in Act I, scene I. d.lib.rochester.edu
- Shakespeare's Hamlet contains 'one auspicious and one dropping eye', spoken by Claudius; this is the First Folio wording, with capitalization and punctuation modernized. en.wikisource.org
- The contrasting eyes express simultaneous joy and grief. en.wikisource.org
Practice
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Origin
Latin auspex ("augur") gave auspicium ("augury"), the source of auspice, and the word was formed from auspice + -ious, possibly with French as a go-between.