Doom

Doom (pronounced doom)

(1) Fate or destiny, especially adverse fate; unavoidable ill fortune.

(2) Ruin; death.

(3) A judgment, decision, or sentence, especially an unfavorable one.

(4) In Christian eschatology, the Last Judgment, at the end of days.

Pre 900: From the Middle English dome & doome from the Old English dōm (a law, statute, decree; administration of justice, judgment; justice, equity, righteousness; condemnation) from the Proto-Germanic domaz (source also of the Old Saxon and Old Frisian dom, the Old Norse domr, the Old High German tuom (judgment, decree), the Gothic doms (discernment, distinction), possibly from the primitive Indo-European root dhe- (to set, place, put, do), (source also of the Sanskrit dhā́man (custom or law), the Greek themis (law) and the Lithuanian domė (attention)).  It was with the Old Norse dōmr (judgement), the Old High German tuom (condition) and the Gothic dōms (sentence).  A book of laws in Old English was a dombec. 

In all its original forms, it seems to have been used in a neutral sense but sometimes also "a decision determining fate or fortune, irrevocable destiny."  The Modern adverse sense of "fate, ruin, destruction" began in the early fourteenth century and evolved into its general sense after circa 1600, influenced by doomsday and the finality of the Christian Judgment. The "crack of doom" is the last trump, the signal for the dissolution of all things and the finality of the Christian Judgment Day, is most memorably evoked in the Old Testament, in Ezekiel 7:7-8.

(7) Doom has come upon you, upon you who dwell in the land. The time has come! The day is near! There is panic, not joy, on the mountains.

(8) I am about to pour out my wrath on you and spend my anger against you. I will judge you according to your conduct and repay you for all your detestable practices.

Doom Paintings

Doom paintings are the vivid depictions of the Last Judgment, that moment in Christian eschatology when Christ judges souls and send them either to Heaven or Hell.  They became popular in medieval English churches as a form of graphical advertising to an often illiterate congregation, dramatizing the difference between rapture of heaven and the agonies of hell, consequences of a life of virtue or wickedness.  During the English Reformation, many doom paintings were destroyed, thought by the new order rather too lavishly Romish.

Weltgericht (Last Judgement) (circa 1435)); Tempera on oak triptych by German artist Stefan Lochner (c1410–1451).