Appearing to be threatening, unfriendly or potentially unpleasant.
What cause, cry’d he, can justify our flight, To tempt the dangers of forbidding night?1726, Homer, “Book XV”, in [Alexander Pope], transl., The Odyssey of Homer. […], volume IV, London: […] Bernard Lintot, →OCLC, page 14, lines 57-58:
[…] he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.1813 January 27, [Jane Austen], chapter 3, in Pride and Prejudice: […], volume I, London: […] [George Sidney] for T[homas] Egerton, […], →OCLC:
4 more examples
With no great disparity between them in point of years, they were, in every other respect, as unlike and far removed from each other as two men could well be. The one was soft-spoken, delicately made, precise, and elegant; the other, a burly square-built man, negligently dressed, rough and abrupt in manner, stern, and, in his present mood, forbidding both in look and speech.1841 February–November, Charles Dickens, “Barnaby Rudge. Chapter 12.”, in Master Humphrey’s Clock, volume II, London: Chapman & Hall, […], →OCLC, page 301:
The writer of the “blank” letter begins fluently with the date and “Dear Mary,” and then sits and chews his penholder or makes little dots and squares and circles on the blotter—utterly unable to attack the cold, forbidding blankness of that first page.1922, Emily Post, chapter 28, in Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, published 1923, page 498:
As we breasted the first summit, the precipitous mass of the Raven's Rock, towering some 250 ft. above the railway, looked grim and forbidding in the failing light, and distant Ben Wyves was shrouded in mist.1951 January, H. A. Vallance, “Kyle of Lochalsh Revisited”, in Railway Magazine, page 14:
Its forbidding brick and concrete exterior looms over a vast, windswept brick plaza in a style architectural critics, not without admiration, call “The New Brutalism.”1988 January 10, “If You Can’t Fight City Hall, Here’s a Different Idea: Sell It”, in The New York Times:
The act by which something is forbidden; a prohibition.
But all these poor forbiddings could not stay him;1594, William Shakespeare, Lucrece (First Quarto), London: […] Richard Field, for Iohn Harrison, […], →OCLC:
1920, St. John G. Ervine, The Foolish Lovers, London: W. Collins & Sons, Chapter 3, VIII, p. 228, All law was composed of hindrances and obstacles and forbiddings, and therefore he was entirely opposed to Law.