terror

Etymology

From late Middle English terrour, from Old French terreur (“terror, fear, dread”), from Latin terror (“fright, fear, terror”), from terrēre (“to frighten, terrify”), from Old Latin tr̥reō, from Proto-Italic *trozeō, from Proto-Indo-European *tre- (“to shake”), *tres- (“to tremble”).

noun

1. (countable, uncountable) Intense dread, fright, or fear.
   The terrors with which I was seized […] were extreme. 1794, William Godwin, Things as they are; or, The adventures of Caleb
   Fear of their cargo bred a savage cruelty into the crew. One captain, to strike terror into the rest, killed a slave and dividing heart, liver and entrails into 300 pieces made each of the slaves eat one, threatening those who refused with the same torture. Such incidents were not rare. 1963, C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd Revised edition, page 9
2. (uncountable) The action or quality of causing dread; terribleness, especially such qualities in narrative fiction.
   1921, Edith Birkhead, The tale of terror: a study of the Gothic romance:
3. (countable) Something or someone that causes such fear.
   The Begums' ministers, on the contrary, to extort from them the disclosure of the place which concealed the treasures, were, […] after being fettered and imprisoned, led out on to a scaffold, and this array of terrours proving unavailing, the meek tempered Middleton, as a dernier resort, menaced them with a confinement in the fortress of Chunargar. Thus, my lords, was a British garrison made the climax of cruelties! 1788 June, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, “Mr. Sheridan’s Speech, on Summing Up the Evidence on the Second, or Begum Charge against Warren Hastings, Esq., Delivered before the High Court of Parliament, June 1788”, in Select Speeches, Forensick and Parliamentary, with Prefatory Remarks by N[athaniel] Chapman, M.D., volume I, [Philadelphia, Pa.]: Published by Hopkins and Earle, no. 170, Market Street, published 1808, →OCLC, page 474
   The terrors of the storm 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson, (Please provide the book title or journal name)
   A chap named Eleazir Kendrick and I had chummed in together the summer afore and built a fish-weir and shanty at Setuckit Point, down Orham way. For a spell we done pretty well. Then there came a reg'lar terror of a sou'wester same as you don't get one summer in a thousand, and blowed the shanty flat and ripped about half of the weir poles out of the sand. 1913, Joseph C. Lincoln, chapter 1, in Mr. Pratt's Patients
4. (uncountable) Terrorism.
   a terror attack
   the War on Terror
   Rank-and-file progressives don’t usually think of the immigration policies they support—expanding refugee quotas, easing restrictions on some classes of immigrants, and ending family separation—as an endorsement of detention, deportation, and racialized terror. 2019-7-15, Greg Afinogenov, “The Jewish Case for Open Borders”, in Jewish Currents, number Summer 2019
5. (pathology, countable) A night terror.