Threatened

How to spell threatened

10 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce threatened

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does threatened mean?

1. verbStated an intention to cause harm, or posed a serious danger to something.

Threatened in a sentence

• The rising river threatened to flood the entire valley overnight.

• She felt threatened by the abrupt changes to her role at work.

Where does threatened come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word descends from the Old English noun 'threat', spelled þreat, which originally meant a crowd, a troop, or oppression rather than a warning of harm. The verb 'threaten' grew from the Old English þreatnian, meaning to press, urge, or oppress, and over the medieval centuries its sense narrowed to the modern idea of declaring an intention to cause harm. The past form 'threatened' simply adds the regular -ed ending. A small surprise sits in the spelling: the 'ea' is pronounced as a short 'e', a relic of older vowel pronunciations, which is exactly the trap that makes writers want to drop a letter. The same Germanic root that gave us 'threat' is related to words about pushing and crowding, a reminder that a threat was first a kind of forceful pressure before it became a verbal menace.

How the word is built

• threat (Old English root: a crowd, oppression, later a menace)
• -en (verb-forming suffix)
• -ed (past tense/participle)