Other forms: terrors
Terror is very great fear, or violence used deliberately to cause it. The word covers both the feeling and the tactic.
The emotional sense is the older one, and being frozen with terror is stronger than fright or fear. The political sense gave the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a great deal of vocabulary, including terrorism, a terror attack and the war on terror. There is a light informal use in Britain, since calling a child a little terror is almost affectionate. The verb terrify and the adjective terrible come from the same root, though terrible has weakened a great deal.
1nounextremeExtreme fear.
“She lay awake in terror until it got light.”
2nounterrorViolence used to create fear for political ends.
“The country lived under terror for a decade.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Terror is trembling. Latin terreō, to frighten, goes back to a root meaning to tremble, so the word names what fear does to the body rather than what caused it.
Middle English
terrour
English, today
terror
Built from
From Middle English terrour. From late Middle English terrour, from Old French terreur (“terror, fear, dread”), from Latin terror (“fright, fear, terror”), from terreo (“to frighten, terrify”), from itc-ola tr̥reō, from Proto-Italic trozeō, from Proto-Indo-European tre- (“to shake”), tres- (“to tremble”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA