Word.ws English Dictionary

fearbait

fearbait verb: to act in a way that intentionally causes fear to others.

Verb

fearbait (third-person singular simple present fearbaits, present participle fearbaiting, simple past and past participle fearbaited)

  1. (intransitive, transitive) To act in a way that intentionally causes fear to others.
    • I fearbaited him so much he almost jumped out of his chair.

Noun

fearbait (uncountable)

  1. Material intended to bring fear to others.
    • I don't know about you, but I've seen a lot of those videos on YouTube about AI fearbait recently.2026 February 4, CrestOfGreyhound, Reddit, archived from the original on 17 Feb 2026

Forms of fearbait

third-person singular presentfearbaits
present participlefearbaiting
past participlefearbaited
pastfearbaited

Origin of fearbait

From fear + -bait.

Questions about fearbait

What does fearbait mean?
Fearbait means to act in a way that intentionally causes fear to others.
What part of speech is fearbait?
Fearbait can be a verb or a noun.
What is the past tense of fearbait?
The past tense of fearbait is fearbaited.

Words near fearbait in the dictionary

  1. fear mongers
  2. fear not
  3. fear of missing out
  4. fear'd
  5. fearable
  6. fearbait
  7. fearbaited
  8. fearbaiting
  9. fearbaits
  10. Fearby
  11. feard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fearbait (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “fearbait.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fearbait. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.