What's the difference between frighten and terrify?

Frighten


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To disturb with fear; to throw into a state of alarm or fright; to affright; to terrify.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) A former Labour minister, Nicholas Brown, said the public were frightened they "were going to be spied on" and that "illegally obtained" information would find its way to the public domain.
  • (2) The sound of the ambulance frightened us, especially us children, and panic gripped the entire community: people believe that whoever is taken into the ambulance to the hospital will die – you so often don’t see them again.
  • (3) Can somebody who is not a billionaire, who stands for working families, actually win an election into which billionaires are pouring millions of dollars?” Naming prominent and controversial rightwing donors, he said: “It is not just Hillary, it is the Koch brothers, it is Sheldon Adelson.” Stephanopoulos seized the moment, asking: “Are you lumping her in with them?” Choosing to refer to the 2010 supreme court decision that removed limits on corporate political donations, rather than address the question directly, Sanders replied: “What I am saying is that I get very frightened about the future of American democracy when this becomes a battle between billionaires.
  • (4) Subjective measures of anxiety, frightening cognitions and body sensations were obtained across the phases.
  • (5) There is no support in the system and it’s a very frightening and distressing situation to be in.
  • (6) "The problem in the community is that the elderly who live on their own on ground floors are frightened to open the windows because of vandalism and burglary," he says.
  • (7) You say that she taught you not to feel frightened.
  • (8) The facts speak for themselves but it was Mayweather’s refusal to address the allegations that was particularly frightening.
  • (9) Despite the warnings, new protesters of all ages continued to arrive in the camp, insisting they would not be frightened away.
  • (10) "I heard five explosions during the protest this evening and I was frightened - I just wanted to get out of there.
  • (11) I briefly consider logging into a relative’s AOL account and entering the keywords “the sadness of constantly frightened old white people”, but that seems too general.
  • (12) Regardless of fringe rucks, these protests are more likely to lay the ground for wider public and industrial campaigns than frighten them off.
  • (13) Ukraine frightened people here,” says one diplomatic source in Minsk.
  • (14) This is the most frightening picture you will ever see.
  • (15) Actually, I had betrayed the seriousness of what had happened, because my story ignored the fact that I had been genuinely frightened and in a degree of danger during the heckling.
  • (16) Narcolepsy, with its specific symptomatology is an intriguing but often frightening disease.
  • (17) The comedian Stephen Mangan called Cameron’s warning “panicky” and “daft”, while another comedian, Vikki Stone, shared a picture of herself hiding in the shed with a colander on her head and said: “Dear David Cameron I’m frightened.
  • (18) Of those who did not read the notes, only four (17%) were frightened by what they might read, while others stated that they did not have their glasses, could not read, did not think it was their place, thought the notes would not be interesting, or did not understand the policy.
  • (19) Sonia Zambakides, head of Save the Children's Somalia emergency response, added: "While there has been an improvement in these areas thanks to the international aid effort, children are still dying at a frightening rate across Somalia.
  • (20) The reality of the plan you went along with and helped execute was that your children were to be frightened out of sleep in the middle of the night and rescued by their father from a fire that should never have been started.

Terrify


Definition:

  • (v. t.) To make terrible.
  • (v. t.) To alarm or shock with fear; to frighten.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It's a genuine fear, to be terrified of being labelled a racist.
  • (2) The woman who had lost her husband and son had another son, 20 years old, and she was terrified.
  • (3) "I find that terrifying frankly; safety comes from being in a team.
  • (4) In August, the capital came to a standstill as terrified workers were forced to stay home after gang leaders orchestrated a forced public transport boycott by killing a dozen bus drivers in response to a crackdown by authorities against organised crime.
  • (5) Pope is at once sympathetic and terrifying, and it's a measure of Washington's performance that she has to reassure me she's nothing like Pope in real life.
  • (6) This raises two issues: first, the treatment being meted out to thousands of people should be a moral offence to all of us; and second, our flexible labour market and increasingly brutal welfare system are now so constructed that even if you are doing well, it is perfectly possible that you could fall ill, and then find yourself just as terrified as the thousands who are currently being herded through the WCA process.
  • (7) As he described, with something approaching relish, the horrifying effect of a desperate eurozone willing to destroy the British economy, our industry and our society, purely to protect itself, I was reminded of the epic Last Judgement by John Martin, now in the Tate, which depicts the terrifying chaos as the good are separated from the evil damned.
  • (8) Mugabe and his Zanu-PF thugs, terrified of losing their empire, unleashed a carefully targeted anarchy at anyone who showed the slightest sign of dissent.
  • (9) Lord of the Rings made him the doomed anti-hero , he was easily the best thing in the disastrous Troy, giving Odysseus guile, wit and that familiar, rough-edged charm, and he terrified TV viewers as property developer John Dawson in the dark and brilliant Red Riding .
  • (10) Chained and terrified, she made her choice and lied.
  • (11) I lived through terrifying moments during the steepest of my professional learning curves and was perpetually sleep-deprived.
  • (12) He says of the rumoured mood of fear among staff at Philly HQ: "I wasn't terrifying, but I wasn't someone to be tampered with.
  • (13) This is legitimately terrifying.” Several commentators compared Comey’s sudden sacking with the 1973 “Saturday night massacre” when President Richard Nixon dismissed Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor appointed to look into the Watergate affair.
  • (14) I’d have hated to hear that Russell had been dragged, terrified, to his death.
  • (15) A Peta statement added: "We are appalled by photos of a visibly terrified monkey crudely strapped into a restraint device in which he was allegedly launched into space by the Iranian Space Agency.
  • (16) So, to summarise, Shorten and his speechwriting team looked out into the mildly terrifying and endlessly fracturing political landscape of January 2017 and concluded that politics had to be personal.
  • (17) Meanwhile the Dublin government, terrified of the impact that a UK withdrawal could have on its own economy, has warned darkly of immigration and custom posts returning.
  • (18) But it was on 9 August 2007 that fear took over – the banks, terrified at the scale of the toxic debt in the system, simply stopped lending to each other and the world's money markets froze.
  • (19) "But where in Dostoevsky or Poe the protagonist experiences his double as a terrifying embodiment of his own otherness (and especially his own voraciousness and destructiveness), we barely notice the difference between ourselves and our online double.
  • (20) It wasn't that the drinking was great, but I was so terrified of not drinking.