Frightened

How to spell frightened

10 letters · 2 syllables

1 of the 28 people asked to spell frightened in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce frightened

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does frightened mean?

1. adjectiveMade afraid; feeling or showing fear.

Frightened in a sentence

• The frightened child refused to enter the dark basement.

• She felt frightened when the brakes failed on the steep hill.

Where does frightened come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows out of the Old English noun fyrhto, meaning 'fear' or 'terror', which sat alongside the related verb forhtian, 'to be afraid'. By the Middle English period the noun had settled into the form 'fright', and a new verb 'frighten' was formed by adding the causative suffix -en, so that to frighten someone literally meant to fill them with fright. The past participle 'frightened' then served both as the verb's past form and as a descriptive adjective for a person gripped by fear. The puzzling 'gh' in the spelling is a fossil: it once stood for a guttural sound, something like the rasp in the Scots word 'loch', that English speakers gradually stopped pronouncing while the letters stubbornly stayed on the page. That silent 'gh' is the chief spelling trap, since the word sounds exactly as though it were written 'frite-nd'. The same Germanic root for fear survives in the modern German 'Furcht'.

How the word is built

• fright (Old English fyrhto: fear, terror)
• -en (verb-forming suffix: to cause)
• -ed (past-tense/adjective suffix)