terrorist

Pluralterrorists

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A person, group, or organization that uses violence, or the threat of violence, to advance political aims.

   A lone terrorist detonated explosives near the embassy to protest the occupation.

   Investigators traced the funds to terrorists operating across the border.

   Note

   The noun came into English from French terroriste, and it is built like any agent noun: terror plus -ist. Edmund Burke was the first to use it. Beside the French Revolutionary sense, this meaning reaches past France to anyone who pursues political goals through violence or its threat. It can name a single person or a whole organization. In a phrase like a terrorist attack, the word is working as the adjective instead.

2. 2
   adjective

   Relating to or characteristic of terrorism and the people who carry it out.

   Authorities increased security after a series of terrorist threats.

   The court convicted him of belonging to a terrorist organization.

   Note

   Here the noun is pressed into service before another noun: terrorist allies, a terrorist organization, terrorist threats. It does not take degrees, so nothing is more terrorist or most terrorist than something else. George Walker Bush's 2002 State of the Union shows the typical shape in "their terrorist allies," the phrase that stood beside "axis of evil."

3. 3
   nounhistoricalcountable

   In France during the Terror of 1793–94, an agent or backer of the Revolutionary Tribunal.

   As a zealous terrorist, he denounced his own neighbors to the tribunal.

   The terrorists of 1794 wielded the guillotine as an instrument of state policy.

   Note

   Historians keep this meaning for France in 1793–1794, when Jacobin tribunals sent thousands of suspected enemies of the Republic to the guillotine. Use it only where that setting is unmistakable, as in the terrorists of 1794 or a Jacobin terrorist. Otherwise a modern reader will hear the political-violence meaning first.

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