Word.ws English Dictionary

fearthought

fearthought noun: excessive and unhealthy apprehensiveness; unnecessary fearfulness.

Noun

fearthought (uncountable)

  1. Excessive and unhealthy apprehensiveness; unnecessary fearfulness.
    • To assist in the analysis of fear, and in the denunciation of its expressions, I have coined the word fearthought to stand for the unprofitable element of forethought, and have defined the word 'worry' as fearthought in contradistinction to forethought. I have also defined fearthought as the...1897, Horace Fletcher, Happiness as found in Forethought minus Fearthought (Chicago & New York: Stone), pp. 24–25
    • The “misery-habit,” the “martyr-habit,” engendered by the prevalent “fearthought,” get pungent criticism from the mind-cure writers ...1902, William James, “Lectures 4 & 5”, in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature […] , New York, N.Y.; London: Longmans, Green, and Co. […], →OCLC

Origin of fearthought

Blend of fear + forethought. Coined by Horace Fletcher as part of New Thought Movement at the turn of the twentieth century.

Questions about fearthought

What does fearthought mean?
Fearthought means excessive and unhealthy apprehensiveness; unnecessary fearfulness.
What part of speech is fearthought?
Fearthought is a noun.

Words near fearthought in the dictionary

  1. fearsome critter
  2. fearsome critters
  3. fearsomely
  4. fearsomeness
  5. fearsweat
  6. fearthought
  7. feasability
  8. feasable
  9. feasance
  10. feasances
  11. fease

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fearthought (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.

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