Afears

Part of speech: verb

Definitions

1. Archaically, it means to frighten or terrify a person so that they become alarmed or filled with dread
2. An old poetic term meaning to put someone into a state of fear, causing them to be startled or alarmed
3. Dated usage meaning to make a person feel fright or dread, striking them with sudden alarm

Etymology: "Afears" is simply the third-person singular present form of "afear," a verb meaning to frighten or terrify. The verb descends from Old English "āfǣran," built from the perfective prefix ā- and "fǣran," meaning to frighten or to devour, which itself came from "fǣr," a word for sudden danger, calamity or ambush. The most striking detail is that the root carries a sense of sudden attack. "Fǣr" traces back to a Proto-Germanic word for danger, and the ancestral idea of risk runs deeper still, to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to try or dare. Terror, in other words, was originally pictured as something that pounced. The verb arrived in Middle English as "aferen," meaning to frighten or terrify, and survived for centuries in that sense, though it is now rare outside older writing and dialect.

Synonyms: frighten, scare, terrify, alarm

Antonyms: reassure, calm