Meaning
Cold, gloomy, and slow to smile - temperamentally heavy, as if born under a leaden sky. It is jovial's standing antonym: where the jovial host laughs, the saturnine guest writes letters about it afterwards. Literary and faintly gothic - it flatters the described face with drama; remember the medical shadow, saturnine poisoning, in older texts. Jove's jovial is its opposite by design. Regional use: General English; Roman-astrological origin.
Origin
Saturn, the old Roman god of seed-time and golden ages, gave his name to the outermost planet known to antiquity, and astrology assigned those born under it a grave, chilly disposition - the belief that produced the adjective, via Old French from Medieval Latin Saturninus. The planet also carried lead in the alchemical correspondence of metals and stars, so saturnine doubled as a word for leaden, and the pathology of lead poisoning became saturnism. English has enjoyed the pairing for three centuries: the Spectator of 1711 divided its readers into the mercurial and the saturnine, exactly the two god-temperaments side by side; Smollett's saturnine disposition gentlemen followed in 1751; Dickens gave his Signal-Man a fixed eye and saturnine face in 1866; and modern usage stretches it to scenes as easily as faces - a saturnine near-vacant arena in a 2019 Guardian report. The god himself, ironically, presided over the year's merriest festival, the Saturnalia.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a saturnine temperament
- saturnine countenance
- saturnism
Usage Examples
- The saturnine porter surveyed the wedding party, sighed once, and resumed his newspaper.
- Her saturnine reading of the quarterly accounts turned out, as usual, to be the accurate one.
- A saturnine foreman announced the overtime roster: all of it, starting tonight, no exceptions.