Suspense

How to spell suspense

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce suspense

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does suspense mean?

1. nounA state of anxious or excited uncertainty while waiting to learn what will happen.

Suspense in a sentence

• The suspense of waiting for the test results kept her awake all night.

• The director built the suspense slowly so the final scene felt earned.

Where does suspense come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Suspense traces back to the Latin verb suspendere, meaning literally 'to hang up' or 'to hold up', formed from sub-, here in the sense of 'up from under', and pendere, 'to hang'. The past participle suspensus gave a noun sense of being left hanging, neither up nor down, and from this came the figurative idea of a matter left undecided or in mid-air. English took the word in the late 1300s through Anglo-French and Old French suspens, where it described a legal or moral state of being held in abeyance. Over the following centuries the meaning drifted from 'undecided condition' toward the modern feeling of anxious, breathless waiting for an outcome. The same pendere root still hangs inside relatives like pendant, pending and suspend, and noticing that family helps explain why the word ends in -ense rather than the more common -ence.

How the word is built

• sus- (from sub-, up from under)
• pens (from Latin pendere, to hang)
• -e