Scary

How to spell scary

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce scary

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does scary mean?

1. adjectiveCausing fear or alarm; frightening.

Scary in a sentence

• The old house at the end of the lane looked genuinely scary at night.

• Driving through the storm was a scary experience for the whole family.

Where does scary come from?

Language of origin: Old Norse

The adjective scary is built on the verb 'scare', which English absorbed from the Old Norse verb 'skirra', meaning 'to frighten' or 'to make timid'. That Norse word arrived during the period of Viking settlement and gradually settled into Middle English as 'skerren' and later 'scare'. The adjective form, meaning 'causing fright', is a relatively recent coinage that appears in the mid 1800s, formed simply by adding the common '-y' suffix that turns a noun or verb into an adjective describing a quality. The same '-y' pattern gives us 'sleepy', 'dreamy', and 'cloudy'. The spelling trap is the single 'r' and the change of the silent 'e' in 'scare' to a 'y', so it is never written 'scarey'.

How the word is built

• scar- (from 'scare', to frighten)
• -y (adjective suffix meaning 'characterised by')