scary.
Causing fear or anxiety
Meaning & usage
Causing fear or anxiety
The tiger's jaws were scary.
She was hiding behind her pillow during the scary parts of the film.
Uncannily striking or surprising.
Linda changed her hair, and it’s scary how much she looks like her mother.
Subject to sudden alarm; easily frightened.
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree English scare Proto-Indo-European *-kos Proto-Germanic *-gaz Proto-West Germanic *-g Old English -iġ Middle English -y English -y English scary From scare + -y.
To a scary extent; scarily.
Where this word comes from
Etymology tree English scare Proto-Indo-European *-kos Proto-Germanic *-gaz Proto-West Germanic *-g Old English -iġ Middle English -y English -y English scary From scare + -y.
Barren land having only a thin coat of grass.
Where this word comes from
From dialectal English scare (“scraggy”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.