Frightening

How to spell frightening

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce frightening

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does frightening mean?

1. adjectiveCausing fear, alarm, or anxiety.

Frightening in a sentence

• The storm produced a frightening noise on the roof through the night.

• Losing your job without savings is a frightening prospect.

Where does frightening come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word grows from the Old English noun 'fyrhto', meaning fear or terror, which itself came from a Germanic root shared with the modern German word 'Furcht', meaning fear. By the late Middle Ages the noun had settled into the spelling 'fright', and around the early 1600s English speakers added the verb-forming suffix -en to make 'frighten', meaning to fill someone with fear, on the same pattern that turned 'soft' into 'soften' and 'length' into 'lengthen'. The present participle 'frightening' then became a common adjective for anything that causes alarm. The spelling preserves the silent 'gh' that once stood for a throaty sound long since lost from English speech, the same fossil cluster seen in 'night', 'light', and 'might', which is exactly the trap that makes the word easy to misspell.

How the word is built

• fright (fear, terror)
• -en (verb-forming suffix)
• -ing (forming the present participle / adjective)