Scare

How to spell scare

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce scare

What does scare mean?

1. verbTo cause someone or something to feel sudden fear.
2. nounA sudden feeling of fright, or a period of widespread alarm.

Scare in a sentence

• verb

  Loud fireworks can scare the neighbourhood dogs.

• noun

  The health scare caused shoppers to empty the shelves overnight.

• verb

  The sudden noise from the attic did scare the children.

• noun

  A near miss on the motorway gave her a real scare.

Where does scare come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

Scare comes from the Old Norse verb skirra, meaning 'to frighten' or 'to ward off', which was itself built on the adjective skjarr, meaning 'shy' or 'timid'. Norse settlers brought the word into the north of England during the Viking age, and it surfaced in Middle English around the 1200s in the form skerre, meaning to startle or drive away. Over the centuries the spelling settled into 'scare' as the long vowel sound came to be written with a silent final 'e'. The same Norse root for timidity also lies behind the now rare adjective 'scarry' and the dialect word 'scar' for a shy creature. The trap for writers is mostly the sound: 'scare' rhymes with 'care' and 'fair', so the plain spelling can feel less obvious than its homophone-like neighbours.

How the word is built

• scare (from Old Norse skirra, to frighten)
• no affix