Terrific

How to spell terrific

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce terrific

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does terrific mean?

1. adjectiveExtremely good, impressive, or enjoyable.
2. adjectiveVery great in degree, size, or intensity, often in a frightening way.

Terrific in a sentence

• The team did a terrific job on the quarterly report.

• A terrific storm tore the roof tiles off the old barn.

• She got a terrific deal on the flights to Lisbon.

• The brakes failed and the car hit the wall with terrific force.

Where does terrific come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin terrificus, meaning 'causing terror' or 'frightful', a compound built from terrere, 'to frighten', and the element -ficus, 'making', from facere, 'to make'. When English adopted it around the middle of the 1600s, it kept that original alarming sense, so a 'terrific' sight was one that inspired dread. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meaning drifted, first toward 'very great in size or intensity' (a terrific storm, a terrific noise) and then, by the early twentieth century, all the way to its modern colloquial sense of 'excellent' or 'wonderful'. This is the same softening journey that 'terrible' and 'awful' partly travelled, and the shared terrere root still links terrific to 'terror', 'terrify' and 'deterrent'. The spelling trap lives in the middle: the doubled r echoes the Latin terrere, while the single f reflects facere, so it is 'terr' then 'ific', never the other way around.

How the word is built

• terri- (from Latin terrere: to frighten)
• -fic (from facere: to make)
• -ic (adjective suffix)