The word "presentiment" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to a feeling, either conscious or subconscious, that something is going to happen, especially something bad. For example, "He had a presentiment that something unfortunate was about to occur."
In his latest book, Richard Overy, a distinguished British historian of the second world war, has turned his attention to the period between the wars when, he argues, the presentiment of impending disaster was even more deeply felt (and perhaps with better reason) than it is today.
Ruth reveals herself to be a damaged woman with terminal self-obsession, and Chanter accords her a first-person narrative of sombre presentiment: "One summer was all it took before our dream started to curl at the edges and stain like picked primroses.
Why did all of this come to me as a presentiment?
In the grocery store, listening to the same talk over and over, I began to feel a superstitious fear, the presentiment that in these endless discussions something awful was being hatched.
"What time did that happen?" I asked, with a disturbing presentiment.
A presentiment is primarily a mental experience of time: it is time experienced circularly, in its movement toward the future, and back to the present.
It might be thought that such intimations and presentiments as these have little to do with the social sciences.
Certain lines we read, and reread, are like captions to the city — presentiments engraved into the asphalt.
He did not have any headaches that day, or dark presentiments.
I hope it's age rather than presentiments.
Presentiments like this come early and often in Peter Behrens's otherwise impressive new novel, "The O'Briens," which follows four generations of an Irish family from the wilds of Quebec at the turn of the 20th century through British Columbia, California, New York, Montreal, Europe and finally to Maine in the 1960s.
