- impending
- impending, imminent are comparable when they mean very likely to occur soon or without further warning. Both retain in this sense some feeling of now rare or disused senses in which they essentially denote being physically elevated and hanging over or projecting as if about to fall and, as a result, tend to convey an ominous or portentous note{
impending doom
}{imminent disaster
}Occasionally this feeling may be lacking and the words imply no more than the near futurity of the thing qualified{the look of anticipation, of sweet, impending triumph— Weston
}{the mounting heat of June warned us . . . that our departure was imminent— Repplier
}Distinctively impending suggests that the thing likely to occur is foreshadowed far enough ahead to allow one time for worry and suspense or for aversive action{at the sound of thunder we hurried in to avoid the impending storm
}{worrying over his position in the impending reorganization of the company
}{the country must swiftly prepare to defend itself against this impending economic rape— Walinsky
}Imminent usually implies greater immediacy and may suggest that the thing is on the point of happening{thrown into sweats of suspicion that discovery was imminent— Meredith
}{we were in imminent danger of being swamped by the white-caps— London
}but imminent, unlike impending, may lose much or all of its suggestion of futurity and then attributes nearness in some other than temporal relation to the thing qualified{they could hear the city, evocative and strange, imminent and remote; threat and promise both— Faulkner
}{in matters where the national importance is imminent and direct even where Congress has been silent, the States may not act at all— Justice Holmes
}{all that we had ever thought or felt for home was real again, made imminent and present by the arrival of the Fortresses— Skidmore
}
New Dictionary of Synonyms. 2014.
