(n.) A spirit; a ghost; an apparition; a hobgoblin.
(n.) The chimaera.
Example Sentences:
(1) Top Gear, Robin Hood, Doctor Who, Primeval and Spooks were the company's top five highest-grossing shows sold internationally.
(2) Turning on the community suggests they are spooked by the growing support to protect our national treasures.
(3) But political corruption and the implacable opposition of the spooks and military to progressive change are the traditional forms of anti-democratic politics, in Britain, as elsewhere.
(4) Two witnesses said they thought the gorilla was trying to protect the boy at first, before getting spooked by the screams of onlookers.
(5) Backing the spooks against a left-leaning newspaper is, for a Tory prime minister, a no-brainer.
(6) Investors were also spooked by a chequered sales performance as breakneck growth stuttered at home and abroad.
(7) In the latest CIA coup, America's leading spooks have sent the Twittersphere into a frenzy with their chucklesome debut on social media: "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet."
(8) She is, therefore, basically the Ruth Evershed (from Spooks) of the ancient world.
(9) The 'judge-led inquiry' that never was is shut down and investigating kidnap and torture in freedom's name will be left to a watchdog that never barks and which exonerated the spooks six years ago."
(10) If the only black people they see are the "looky looky" men on the beach selling fake watches then the idea of a black holidaymaker might spook them.
(11) "She has reinvented family drama in Doctor Who, Robin Hood and Merlin and launched acclaimed contemporary series such as Spooks and Life on Mars as well as Cranford.
(12) Any list of the decade's most memorable shows would be dominated by series that began in its early years: The Office, Spooks, Peep Show, The Thick of It, Shameless.
(13) Greece spooked investors for a third day running on Thursday as the Athens stock exchange fell 7.35% amid fears over the debt-stricken country’s future in the eurozone.
(14) If the desertion of some of their juniors has spooked Egypt's generals, they are being careful not to show it.
(15) In the technology world, a still-young and rapidly expanding business posting losses isn't unusual, and it's unlikely to spook many investors.
(16) The Daily Mail and the Spectator apparently don't care much if spooks routinely capture and comb all our emails and phone traffic.
(17) After our daughter left, my wife would sometimes go to her room – pictures of Spooks, etc – and cry.
(18) He is said to have entered the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit premises on 3 April and walked away on 5 April, spooked by the discovery that the fire escape door they had previously used had been locked in the interim.
(19) As the debate in ancient Westminster Hall wound on and the libertarians (security must not undermine basic freedoms) proved the better-briefed side, the spook faction got a bit dirty, as is their patriotic duty.
(20) That’s how Mussolini got in, that’s how Hitler got in: they took advantage of a situation, a problem perhaps, which humanity was going through at the time, after an economic crisis.” Peña Nieto’s pronouncements are the most forceful so far against Trump, whose rise to the top of the Republican primary races has spooked Mexicans of all social strata.
Startle
Definition:
(v. t.) To move suddenly, or be excited, on feeling alarm; to start.
(v. t.) To excite by sudden alarm, surprise, or apprehension; to frighten suddenly and not seriously; to alarm; to surprise.
(v. t.) To deter; to cause to deviate.
(n.) A sudden motion or shock caused by an unexpected alarm, surprise, or apprehension of danger.
Example Sentences:
(1) These later results suggest that dopamine agonists increase sensorimotor reactivity measured with acoustic startle by acting on sensory rather than motor parts of the reflex arc.
(2) The hypothesis that the standard acoustic startle habituation paradigm contains the elements of Pavlovian fear conditioning was tested.
(3) But that promise was beginning to startle the markets, which admire Monti’s appetite for austerity and fear the free spending and anti-European views of some Italian politicians.
(4) Both startle amplitude and onset latency showed significantly greater facilitation in the preschool children than in the 8-year-olds and adults.
(5) flexion, stretch, rolling, startle, jumping (stepping), and writhing.
(6) Three response patterns were scored: (1) no startle, (2) startle without response decrement, and (3) response decrement by 12 stimuli.
(7) More importantly, motor and cardiovascular responses to startle may be separated through discrimination of afferent stimuli suggesting either differences in neural pathways for acoustic and tactile stimuli or a differential dependency of the various responses on stimulus characteristics.
(8) The startle-elicited increase in blood pressure was significantly elevated in SHRs and at the same time the acoustic startle response was depressed as compared to WKY rats.
(9) A placebo effect could not definitely be ruled out, but the startling changes seen in patients who had been followed for years with other forms of therapy suggest strongly that this improvement was genuine.
(10) In general, conditions that affect the amplitude of the acoustic startle reflex similarly influence the disruptive effect of a noise burst on motor performance, but the two measures are not correlated in the detail necessary to suggest a causative relationship.
(11) The results are compared to other drugs known to affect the startle reflex.
(12) In awake rats the latency of auditory startle recorded electromyographically in the neck is about 5 ms, suggesting that the primary component of this brainstem reflex is mediated by a neural circuit with only a few synapses.
(13) A series of seven experiments related amplitude and latency of the pigeon's startle response, elicited by an intense visual stimulus, to antecedent auditory and visual events in the sensory environment.
(14) The acoustic startle response (ASR) of male rats was measured during several sessions over a 24-hr period in both a light-dark cycle and a constant-dark condition.
(15) That dramatically shifts the focus back to us, the programme makers, to come up with more, new, startling ideas, absolutely unmissable storylines and settings, the sharpest writing.
(16) Because ammocoetes are burrowing filter feeders, this startle behavior results in rapid withdrawal of the head into the burrow.
(17) Startle was indexed by the eyeblink, which was measured by vertical electro-oculography.
(18) In the present work no significant differences were found between the behaviour of FG7142-kindled rats and vehicle-treated controls in social interaction test, elevated plus maze, or the Vogel conflict test of anxiety or in tests of home cage aggression or startle responses.
(19) The first attempted to determine a sonic boom level below which startle would not occurr.
(20) It is able to (1) sample startle responses from 5 animals simultaneously during a specific time band after the eliciting stimulus; (2) convert the analogue startle amplitudes into 2-digit numbers; (3) print the digital results of each startle in each animal; (4) add up the startle amplitudes for each rat over a preset number of stimuli and print the totals; (5) print the interstimulus interval and (6) code for up to six diferent types of trials.