scary
Americanadjective
-
causing fright or alarm.
-
easily frightened; timid.
adjective
-
causing fear or alarm; frightening
-
easily roused to fear; timid
Other Word Forms
Adjective Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of scary
Explanation
If something is scary, it makes you afraid, or scared. Horror films — scary movies — are a very popular genre. Apparently people like to be frightened. Scary is more a more casual way to say "frightening," and you can also use it to describe something that's just bizarre or odd or exceptional: you've become such a good golfer, it's scary; or, you cleaned up you room so fast, it's scary. Note that there is no "e" in scary, even though the verb to scare ends in one.
Vocabulary lists containing scary
Florida's B.E.S.T. Common Suffixes: -y
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"Leapin' Lizards! Is That a Real Dragon?"
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Unit 18, Lesson 1
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The bombshell announcement was full of scary, highly technical terms: "a swarm of sandboxes", "agentic attacker", and "self-migrating command and control".
From BBC ● Jul. 24, 2026
"I find it quite scary how easy it's becoming to film people and post them on social media without them even knowing there's a camera."
From BBC ● Jul. 18, 2026
“We see shadow figures … there’s a certain area where they pass back and forth. They don’t do anything, but they’re scary as hell,” Kobliha says of unusual sightings.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 17, 2026
"They're saying it's going to be huge; of course that's scary, right?"
From Barron's ● Jul. 10, 2026
“It’s nice to have good news. But it feels strange to bring goslings into such a scary world.”
From "The Wild Robot Protects" by Peter Brown
Barker has no interest in shining some light on Nikki when keeping his woebegone protagonist in the dark is scarier.
From Salon ● Jun. 4, 2026
Of course, a skeptic is going to tell these Knicks that their opponents have been lousy, and what’s coming—the winner of a tense Western Conference Final between San Antonio and Oklahoma City—is far scarier.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 26, 2026
On the scarier side, Wright says there's another place we can already see the combination of robotics and agentic AI: battlefield drones.
From BBC ● Apr. 7, 2026
Eye-watering capex, like a blunt medical diagnosis, can sometimes sound far scarier than it ultimately proves to be.
From Barron's ● Feb. 2, 2026
And as the months went by, she neglected to complain about an even scarier development.
From "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents" by Julia Alvarez
"And the scariest thing is for the children. My children are just very afraid."
From Barron's ● Jul. 9, 2026
On Facebook she said: "It was one of the scariest things ever. It was traumatising."
From BBC ● May 4, 2026
Less than a year ago, Boston superstar Jayson Tatum suffered basketball’s scariest injury.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 23, 2026
Without my boyfriend’s paycheck buffering our vibes-based accounting, it was time to face the scariest part of managing your money: the spending audit.
From MarketWatch ● Mar. 31, 2026
Unfortunately, that warning isn’t the scariest part of what was inside the briefcase.
From "Amari and the Night Brothers" by B.B. Alston
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
