threat
pronunciation
How to pronounce threat in British English:
UK [θret]
How to pronounce threat in American English:
US [θret]
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- Noun:
- something that is a source of danger
- a warning that something unpleasant is imminent
- declaration of an intention or a determination to inflict harm on another
- a person who inspires fear or dread
Word Origin
- threat
- threat: [OE] Threat originally meant ‘trouble, oppression’; ‘expression of an intention to do harm’ is a secondary sense, which arose out of the notion of ‘putting pressure’ on someone. It came from a prehistoric base *thraut-, *threut-, *thrut-, which probably went back to Indo- European *trud- ‘push, press’ (source also of Latin trūdere ‘thrust’, from which English gets abstruse, intrude, etc, and probably also of English thrust).=> abstruse, intrude
- threat (n.)
- Old English þreat "crowd, troop," also "oppression, coercion, menace," related to þreotan "to trouble, weary," from Proto-Germanic *thrautam (cognates: Dutch verdrieten, German verdrießen "to vex"), from PIE *treud- "to push, press squeeze" (cognates: Latin trudere "to press, thrust," Old Church Slavonic trudu "oppression," Middle Irish trott "quarrel, conflict," Middle Welsh cythrud "torture, torment, afflict"). Sense of "conditional declaration of hostile intention" was in Old English.
Example
- 1. The second great threat is human .
- 2. The us strongly condemned the threat .
- 3. Yet the threat is there .
- 4. How credible is the threat ?
- 5. Competition is also a threat .