15 Terms for Those Who Tell the Future

15 Terms for Those Who Tell the Future 15 Terms for Those Who Tell the Future 15 Terms for Those Who Tell the Future By Mark Nichol Do you need a word for a person who foretells the future? Take care in your selection. There are plenty of synonyms, but most have a unique connotation. Here are 15 mostly distinct terms and their specific meanings: 1. augur: One who predicts events based on omens; the name stems from officials in ancient Rome who carried out this type of task. (The verb form is used in the expression â€Å"augurs well,† as in â€Å"This outcome augurs well for us.†) Not to be confused with auger, the word for a device or tool for boring holes. 2. Cassandra: One who correctly predicts unfortunate events in vain, from the character in Greek mythology so cursed. 3. crystal gazer: One who uses a crystal or glass globe or other objects in order to channel knowledge; a modern sense is of predicting without sufficient information. 4. doomsayer: One who routinely predicts disaster. (See Cassandra for a special sense.) 5. fortune-teller: One who foretells events, generally to a client regarding that person’s personal life. 6. futurist: One who offers opinions or insights about the future based on study of past and current events; this term is most appropriate for a serious discussion of modern predictions about societal issues based on trends. 7. Jeremiah: A pessimistic biblical prophet, and, by extension, anyone who predicts calamity; his name also gave rise to the term jeremiad, meaning â€Å"a complaint or rant.† 8. oracle: A person who serves as the mouthpiece of a deity. (Oracular pronouncements in ancient Greece were obscure and ambiguous, and more than one figure in Greek mythology learned that lesson painfully.) The term now refers, by extension, to anyone respected for the sagacity of their opinions or predictions. 9. palm reader/palmist: A fortune-teller whose predictions are based on reading the lines of a person’s palm. 10. prophesier: One who prophesies (pronounced with a long i), or makes a prediction, often in the sense of a veiled message, handed down through the generations, that foretells an occurrence. 11. prognosticator: One who predicts based on observations of phenomena. 12. prophet: One who reveals through divine inspiration. In the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism), the term refers to one who has received messages directly from God; in this sense, the singular and plural forms are often capitalized. 13. seer: One who predicts events, especially a crystal gazer. By extension, this term refers to insightful modern experts. 14. sibyl: One of a number of female prophets of the ancient world. 15. soothsayer: One who predicts the future by reason, intuition, or magic. There is no noun form of the phrase â€Å"deja vu† that identifies a person who experiences an illusion of having already lived through an event occurring for the first time, but there should be. The term also refers casually to a familiar but unwelcome experience. (â€Å"Support for the Libyan rebels was yet another case of deja vu.†) Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Vocabulary category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:How to Format a US Business Letter15 Words for Household Rooms, and Their Synonyms5 Ways to Reduce Use of Prepositions