terrify
Formsterrifies, terrifying, terrified
- 1
- 2To menace or intimidate someone through fear.
Armed guards terrify anyone who comes near the compound.
The dictator terrified his opponents into silence.
Similarintimidate, frighten, scare, cow, terrorize
Note
Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587–1588) shows the sense at work: valiant men too few in number "cannot terrifie his mightie host." The point is not panic but deterrence, whether one force is threatening enough to make another back down. That is what separates it from the plain "frighten" meaning. Here terrifying is something done to an opponent on purpose, often to bend its will.
- 3To render something terrible or dreadful in its own nature.
Note
An obsolete use in which the thing acted on becomes dreadful itself, rather than a person becoming afraid. It follows the pattern of beautify and simplify, where the verb means "make it so." A modern reader would almost certainly take the word as the everyday "frighten" meaning, so this sense belongs to reading older texts, not to writing new ones.
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Origin
From Middle French terrifier, itself from Latin terrificare.