Sudden means it arrived with no warning at all. A sudden noise in the night, a sudden change in the weather, the sudden silence after a door slams shut.
Sudden describes the event, not the person: a decision can be sudden, you cannot. It also covers movement sharp enough to startle — no sudden movements near a nervous horse, a sudden swerve, a sudden drop where the path ends. The adverb suddenly does most of the daily work, and the noun survives in one fixed phrase only: all of a sudden. Sport borrows it for sudden death, where the next goal ends the match, and medicine for sudden death meaning a death with no warning. Its opposite is gradual.
1adjectivesuddenHappening quickly and with no warning.~98%
“A sudden gust of wind took the umbrella out of his hand.”
synonyms: abrupt, unexpected
2adjectivesharpSharp and quick enough to startle, of a movement or change of direction.~2%
“Don't make any sudden movements near the horse.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 22 sentences found in the wild and placed 22 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
A sudden thing is one that crept up on you. English took it through Old French sodain from Latin subitāneus, from subitus, "sudden" — literally "that which has come stealthily". Subitus was the past participle of subeō, "to come or go stealthily", built from sub, "under", and eō, "go". The old native English word for it, fǣrlīċ, was pushed out.
Latin
subitāneus — sudden
Old French
sodain
Anglo-Norman
sodein
Middle English
sodeyn
English, today
sudden
Built from
From Middle English sodeyn, sodain, from Anglo-Norman sodein, from Old French sodain, subdain (“immediate, sudden”), from Vulgar Latin - *subitānus (“sudden”), from Latin subitāneus (“sudden”), from subitus (“sudden", literally, "that which has come stealthily”), originally the past participle of subeō (“to come or go stealthily”), from sub (“under”) + eō (“go”). a doublet of subitaneous. Displaced native fǣrlīċ.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA