terror

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Intense dread, fright, or fear.

   “The terrors with which I was seized […] were extreme.”

   “"How thinkest thou that I rule this people? I have but a regiment of guards to do my bidding, therefore it is not by force. It is by terror. My empire is of the imagination."”

   “Fear of their cargo bred a savage cruelty into the crew. One captain, to strike terror into the rest, killed a slave and dividing heart, liver and entrails into 300 pieces made each of the slaves eat one, threatening those who refused with the same torture. Such incidents were not rare.”

2. (uncountable)The action or quality of causing dread; terribleness, especially such qualities in narrative fiction.
3. (countable)Something or someone that causes such fear.

   “The Begums' ministers, on the contrary, to extort from them the disclosure of the place which concealed the treasures, were, […] after being fettered and imprisoned, led out on to a scaffold, and this array of terrours proving unavailing, the meek tempered Middleton, as a dernier resort, menaced them with a confinement in the fortress of Chunargar. Thus, my lords, was a British garrison made the climax of cruelties!”

   “The terrors of the storm”

   “A chap named Eleazir Kendrick and I had chummed in together the summer afore and built a fish-weir and shanty at Setuckit Point, down Orham way. For a spell we done pretty well. Then there came a reg'lar terror of a sou'wester same as you don't get one summer in a thousand, and blowed the shanty flat and ripped about half of the weir poles out of the sand.”

4. (uncountable)Terrorism.

   “a terror attack”

   “the War on Terror”

   “Rank-and-file progressives don’t usually think of the immigration policies they support—expanding refugee quotas, easing restrictions on some classes of immigrants, and ending family separation—as an endorsement of detention, deportation, and racialized terror.”

5. (countable)A night terror.

adj

1. (Philippines, slang)A strict teacher who fails most of the students.

   “I have a terror math teacher.”

name

1. (usually)The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
2. (usually)Any specific one of several historical reigns of terror.