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Meaning of terror | Babel Free

Noun CEFR B2 Frequent
ˈtɛɹ.ɚ

Definitions

  1. Intense dread, fright, or fear
  2. Intense dread, fright, or fear.
    countable, uncountable
  3. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
    usually
  4. The action or quality of causing dread; terribleness, especially such qualities in narrative fiction
  5. The action or quality of causing dread; terribleness, especially such qualities in narrative fiction.
    uncountable
  6. Any specific one of several historical reigns of terror.
    usually
  7. Something or someone that causes such fear
  8. Something or someone that causes such fear.
    countable
  9. Terrorism
  10. Terrorism.
    uncountable
  11. A night terror
  12. A night terror.
    countable

Equivalents

Examples

“The terrors with which I was seized […] were extreme.”
“"How thinkest thou that I rule this people? I have but a regiment of guards to do my bidding, therefore it is not by force. It is by terror. My empire is of the imagination."”
“Fear of their cargo bred a savage cruelty into the crew. One captain, to strike terror into the rest, killed a slave and dividing heart, liver and entrails into 300 pieces made each of the slaves eat one, threatening those who refused with the same torture. Such incidents were not rare.”
“The Begums' ministers, on the contrary, to extort from them the disclosure of the place which concealed the treasures, were, […] after being fettered and imprisoned, led out on to a scaffold, and this array of terrours proving unavailing, the meek tempered Middleton, as a dernier resort, menaced them with a confinement in the fortress of Chunargar. Thus, my lords, was a British garrison made the climax of cruelties!”
“The terrors of the storm”
“A chap named Eleazir Kendrick and I had chummed in together the summer afore and built a fish-weir and shanty at Setuckit Point, down Orham way. For a spell we done pretty well. Then there came a reg'lar terror of a sou'wester same as you don't get one summer in a thousand, and blowed the shanty flat and ripped about half of the weir poles out of the sand.”
“a terror attack”
“the War on Terror”
“Rank-and-file progressives don’t usually think of the immigration policies they support—expanding refugee quotas, easing restrictions on some classes of immigrants, and ending family separation—as an endorsement of detention, deportation, and racialized terror.”

CEFR level

B2
Upper Intermediate
This word is part of the CEFR B2 vocabulary — upper intermediate level.
See all B2 English words →

See also

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