Word.ws English Dictionary

scaremongery

scaremongery noun: the act of spreading alarming information that is either exaggerated or untrue in order to scare others.

Noun

scaremongery (uncountable)

  1. The act of spreading alarming information that is either exaggerated or untrue in order to scare others.
    • The honourable Member's statement is a form of scaremongery.1955, New Zealand. Parliament. House of Representatives, Parliamentary Debates, page 3302
    • The magazine Time is not a journal that is given to scaremongery, but in its issue of the 3rd March, 1952, it reported the result of an investigation into television, as it affected children, by a committee of mothers.1956, Australia. Parliament. House of Representatives, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). - Volume 10
  2. Alarming information that is exaggerated or untrue.
    • This deliberately alarmist scaremongery has since been repeated on various occasions, notably in Brazil before 1964 and in Chile under Allende.1979, Peter Flynn, Brazil: a political analysis, →ISBN, page 186
    • The Natural Childbirth movement, a private organisation, was fiercely criticised by some obstetric specialists who were very scathing of natural childbirth techniques and put about a lot of medical scaremongery – for example, that a baby would be exsanguinated if it were placed on the mother's...2012, George N. Christodoulou, Psychosomatic Medicine: Past and Future, →ISBN, page 117

Examples of scaremongery in a sentence

  • As the businessmen have been lobbying hard for the government to take measures to reflate the economy, there may have been an element of scaremongery in their forecast.1979, Latin America Regional Reports: Brazil, page 135:
  • Isbister's duties to read the city newspapers, and I'm afraid they fill his mind with rumors and scaremongery.2011, Philip Reeve, Fever Crumb - Book 1, page 5:

Origin of scaremongery

From scaremonger + -y.

Questions about scaremongery

What does scaremongery mean?
Scaremongery means the act of spreading alarming information that is either exaggerated or untrue in order to scare others.
How do you use scaremongery in a sentence?
As the businessmen have been lobbying hard for the government to take measures to reflate the economy, there may have been an element of scaremongery in their forecast.
What part of speech is scaremongery?
Scaremongery is a noun.

Words near scaremongery in the dictionary

  1. scaremongered
  2. scaremongerer
  3. scaremongerers
  4. scaremongering
  5. scaremongers
  6. scaremongery
  7. scareproof
  8. scarequote
  9. scarequotes
  10. scarer
  11. scarers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: scaremongery (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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