Word.ws English Dictionary

panicked

panicked is the simple past and past participle of panic.

Meaning of panic

Verb

panic (third-person singular simple present panics, present participle panicking, simple past and past participle panicked)

  1. (transitive) To cause (someone) to feel panic (“overwhelming fear or fright”); also, to frighten (someone) into acting hastily.
    • He told us he'd almost stepped on Ellen's body that night—dead and stiffening. Then I'd come round the corner and hailed him, and that panicked him.1927 October, Rudyard Kipling, “Fairy-Kist”, in Limits and Renewals, Dominions edition, London: Macmillan and Co., […], published 1932, →OCLC, page 169
  2. (transitive) To cause (a computer system) to crash.
    • If your new driver has an error that panics the system when you load the driver, then the system will panic again when it tries to reboot after the panic. The system will continue the cycle of panic, reboot, and panic as it attempts to reload the faulty driver every time it reboots after panic.2010, Solaris system engineers, “Managing Devices”, in Solaris 10 System Administration Essentials (Solaris System Administration Series), Santa Clara, Calif.: Sun Microsystems Press, →ISBN, section...
  3. (US, colloquial, transitive) To highly amuse, entertain, or impress (an audience watching a performance or show).
  4. (intransitive) To feel panic, or overwhelming fear or fright; to freak out, to lose one's head.
    • I don't want you to be hopeful, I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day and then I want you to act.2019 January 25, 5:22 from the start, in Our House is on Fire, spoken by Greta Thunberg, Davos, Graubünden, Switzerland: World Economic Forum
  5. (intransitive) Of a computer system: to crash.

See all 14 meanings of panic

Adjective

panicked (comparative more panicked, superlative most panicked)

  1. Experiencing or in a state of panic.
    • I really wasn’t panicked. Despite the four feet of aluminum pole dangling like a misplaced tail, I knew I wasn’t attached to some demon, but had slipped the grip of the man, who then raced after me, yelling invectives guaranteed to emphasize his mistake rather than my escape.2010, Susan Wilson, chapter 9, in One Good Dog, Large Print edition, Waterville, Me.: Wheeler Publishing, →ISBN, page 84

Forms of panicked

comparativemore panicked
superlativemost panicked

Origin of panicked

From panic + -ed.

Words formed from panicked

Questions about panicked

What does panicked mean?
Panicked means experiencing or in a state of panic.
What is panicked the simple past and past participle of?
Panicked is the simple past and past participle of panic.
What part of speech is panicked?
Panicked is an adjective.

Words near panicked in the dictionary

  1. panicful
  2. panicgrass
  3. panicgrasses
  4. Panicijan
  5. panick
  6. panicked
  7. panickedly
  8. panicker
  9. panickers
  10. panickier
  11. panickiest

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: panicked (page history and authors); panic (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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Cite this entry: “panicked.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/panicked. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.