Adjective: fearsome
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more fearsome |
| Superlative | most fearsome |
Sample Sentences
-
fearsome reputation
-
fearsome weapon
-
truly fearsome
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The warriors faced a fearsome enemy.
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She gave him a fearsome glare.
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The dire wolf, Aenocyon dirus, which was the inspiration for the fearsome canine featured in the HBO TV series “Game of Thrones,” was a top predator that once roamed North America. (HBO shares parent company Warner Bros. Discovery with CNN.) [2025 April 7, Katie Hunt, “Scientists say they have resurrected the dire wolf”, in CNN, archived from the original on 27 Apr 2025:]
Adjectives inflected like fearsome
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
1. Etymology tree
2. English fear
3. Proto-Indo-European *sem-
4. Proto-Indo-European *somHós
5. Proto-Germanic *samaz
6. Proto-Germanic *-samaz
7. Proto-West Germanic *-sam
8. Old English -sum
9. Middle English -som
10. English -some
11. English fearsome
12. From fear + -some.
13. Compare German furchtsam (“fearful”, obsolete also “fearsome”); this is more closely equivalent to English frightsome, however. See: German Adjectives '
furchtsam'.