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frightening

adjectiveverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈfɹaɪtənɪŋ//
  • //ˈfɹaɪtnɪŋ//

Causing fear; or capable of causing fear; scary.

adjective

  1. 1

    Causing fear; or capable of causing fear; scary.

    Riding the rollercoaster was a frightening experience.

    The Owl is flying high, frightening to the eye. The Rattler is nearby, Cool is on the fly. Danger is his business.

  2. 2

    figurativeAwful, terrible, very bad.

Etymology

From frighten + -ing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of frightenpresent participle and gerund of frighten

    The scientist was frightening the timid children.

Forms

comparative
more frightening
superlative
most frightening
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).