Frighten

How to spell frighten

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce frighten

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does frighten mean?

1. verbTo make someone feel afraid or alarmed.

Frighten in a sentence

• Loud thunderstorms tend to frighten the dog into hiding under the bed.

• The manager did not mean to frighten the new staff with talk of layoffs.

Where does frighten come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English noun fyrhto, meaning 'fear' or 'dread', which itself came from the same Germanic root that gave English the older noun 'fright'. For centuries the language simply used 'fright' as both a noun and a verb, but during the 1600s speakers attached the productive suffix -en, the same ending that turns 'hard' into 'harden' and 'soft' into 'soften', to make a tidy verb meaning 'to cause fear in someone'. The -en suffix consistently signals 'to make become', which is why frighten parallels strengthen, lengthen, and brighten. The spelling trap lives in the silent 'gh', a fossil from Old English where those letters once represented a throaty sound long since lost from modern English pronunciation. Recognising that frighten shares its core with 'fright' and 'afraid' helps fix the gh in place.

How the word is built

• fright (from Old English fyrhto: fear)
• -en (verb-forming suffix meaning 'to cause to be')