Scary

Part of speech: adjective

Pronunciation: /ˈskɛə.ɹi/

Definitions

1. Eliciting fear or unease by presenting daunting or alarming scenarios
2. Provoking apprehension or anxiety through menacing elements or experiences
3. Producing a strong feeling of fear or dread that can unsettle a person

Etymology: "Scary" is built from "scare" plus the suffix "-y", which turns a noun or verb into an adjective meaning "characterised by" or "full of" the thing named. The suffix has a long lineage: it traces back through Old English "-ig" and Proto-Germanic "-az" to a Proto-Indo-European root, and it is one of the most productive endings in English, which is why it has attached itself to so many everyday words. The more puzzling half is "scare" itself. Its ancestry is also Germanic, but the word's most striking clue is a dialect sense: "scare" once meant "scraggy" or thin, describing something lean and bony. That meaning survives in some regional English, and it is a long way from the modern sense of causing fright. How the sense moved from scrawny to startling is not fully documented, so the link between the two is best understood as a dialect word that drifted into a new territory of meaning.

Synonyms: frightening, terrifying, alarming, intimidating, spooky

Antonyms: comforting, reassuring, calming, soothing, pleasant