Scared means being in a state of fear, nervousness, or panic. If you think they sound pretty much the same, you are not alone. But plenty of people point out the distinctions. Grammarly can save you from misspellings, grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and other writing issues on all your favorite websites.
First, feeling fear is only one definition of afraid. Being afraid might also mean feeling regret or reluctance. Scared would give a different nuance to following two sentences. He seemed afraid to put his name on the petition. Did he refuse to put his name on the petition? Will you be able to make it to the party on Saturday? The grammar of afraid and scared also differs. The preposition by often follows scared.
But what are the rights words to use? Usually, scared, afraid, and frightened all mean the same thing, a way to talk about the feeling of fear. One big difference between afraid and the other adjectives to describe fear scared, frightened, terrified, horrified, spooked is where it goes in a sentence. The puppies are afraid of the cat. The puppies are scared of the cat. The puppies are frightened of the cat. Scared and frightened can also go before a noun, but afraid never goes before a noun.
The scared puppies ran away from the kitten. The frightened puppies ran away from the kitten. The afraid puppies ran away from the kitten. Scared and frightened can be followed by of or by to connect them with nouns or noun phrases, but afraid is only followed by of, never by, to connect it with nouns or noun phrases. For instance, we often teach our students about adjectives of feelings or emotions that can be formed with -ed to describe people and -ing to describe the things that cause the feelings and emotions.
The same pattern works for the more emphatic adjectives terrified and terrifying :. However, we do not use this pattern for scared or afraid. Something that makes us scared is scary and there is no related adjective for afraid :. Scared, frightened and terrified all have related verbs: scare , frighten , terrify :. Scared, frightened, afraid and terrified are probably the most common adjectives to describe feeling fear, but if you want to broaden your vocabulary, there are many other useful alternatives.
Petrified is a very strong word, and also has the corresponding word petrifying :. We often make the word scared stronger by saying we are scared stiff , and if someone is so scared that they cannot think clearly and do not know what to do, we can say that they are panic-stricken.
If someone is slightly afraid of something that is going to happen in the future, we could describe them as apprehensive. A timid person is shy and nervous, while a more negative word for someone who is not brave is cowardly , usually implying that they were too scared to do what was morally right.
Finally, there are several colourful idioms and phrases we use to describe feelings of fear. We can say that our hair stood on end , or that we were shaking in our shoes , quaking in our boots or shaking like a leaf. We can say that our heart was hammering , our heart was in our mouth or that we broke out in a cold sweat. For extreme and serious fear, we could say that our blood ran cold.
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Another one is empathy in emotion! Look into mirror and can go on acting upon feelings of different kinds and gestures.
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