Feared

How to spell feared

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce feared

What does feared mean?

1. verbWas afraid of something, or regarded it with dread or anxiety.
2. adjectiveRegarded with dread; causing fear in others.

Feared in a sentence

• verb

  The staff feared another round of redundancies before the holidays.

• adjective

  The company faced its most feared competitor in the new market.

• verb

  She feared that the late payment would damage her credit score.

• adjective

  He was the most feared examiner in the entire department.

Where does feared come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'fear', which descends from the Old English noun fǣr, meaning a sudden danger, ambush, or calamity, and the related verb fǣran, 'to frighten' or 'to be afraid'. The root is solidly Germanic; close cousins survive in the German Gefahr, meaning 'danger', and the Dutch gevaar with the same sense. Notice that the earliest meaning leaned on the external peril itself, while the modern sense settled on the inner emotion the peril produces, a shift well underway by the Middle English period. The spelling keeps the 'ea' digraph typical of words that once had a long vowel, and the regular '-ed' ending simply marks past time. Because the base already ends in a vowel sound followed by 'r', the only trap is remembering the silent, unstressed 'e' before the 'd' rather than writing 'feard'.

How the word is built

• fear (Old English fǣr: danger, sudden peril)
• -ed (past-tense / participle suffix)