jump scare
jump scare noun: a sudden, unexpected and startling event in media designed to frighten the audience.
Noun
jump scare (plural jump scares)
- A sudden, unexpected and startling event in media designed to frighten the audience.
- They'd do something horrible, maybe kill off a few protagonists, and then make people sit around waiting for the next terrible thing to come along. They called it “setting up a jump scare.”2011, Mira Grant, Deadline, Orbit, published 2011, →ISBN
- Drag Me to Hell capitalizes on the jump scare, scattering it liberally throughout the film to the point where it becomes almost numbing.2011, John Rosenberg, The Healthy Edit: Creative Techniques for Perfecting Your Movie, Focal Press, →ISBN, pages 80–81
- The sudden arrival or advent of something unpleasant.
- white woman jump scare
- A fright caused by this.
- The loud knock at the door gave me a terrible jump scare.
Verb
jump scare (third-person singular simple present jump scares, present participle jump scaring, simple past and past participle jump scared)
- To frighten (an audience) by means of something that happens suddenly without warning.
jump scare meaning in Indonesian and Thai
jump scare in Indonesian
- a technique to suddenly scare the audience
- lonjak takut, peranjatan
jump scare in Thai
- a technique to suddenly scare the audience
- จัมป์สแกร์ jám-sà-gɛ̄ɛ
Forms of jump scare
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | jump scares |
| alternative form | jump-scare |
| alternative form | jumpscare |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | jump scares |
| present participle | jump scaring |
| past participle | jump scared |
| past | jump scared |
Questions about jump scare
- What does jump scare mean?
- Jump scare means a sudden, unexpected and startling event in media designed to frighten the audience.
- What is jump scare in Indonesian?
- Jump scare in Indonesian is lonjak takut, peranjatan. See Jump scare meaning in Indonesian.
- What part of speech is jump scare?
- Jump scare can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of jump scare?
- The plural of jump scare is jump scares.
Words near jump scare in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: jump scare (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-jump scare.wav.
Cite this entry: “jump scare.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jump_scare. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.