Word.ws English Dictionary

threatful

UK/ˈθɹɛtfəl/

threatful adjective: threatening.

Adjective

threatful (comparative more threatful, superlative most threatful)

  1. Threatening.
    • Then he with all his puissance doth striue / To strike his oares, and mightily doth driue / The hollow vessell through the threatfull waue […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • The sound of the gang was diminishing into the distance, and the prophet of doom, restored to eloquence, was sending threatful bolts of damnation, hell-fire, and a brimstone gehenna hurtling after them.1951, John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, published 1954, page 59

Forms of threatful

comparativemore threatful
superlativemost threatful

Origin of threatful

From threat + -ful.

Words formed from threatful

Questions about threatful

What does threatful mean?
Threatful means threatening.
What part of speech is threatful?
Threatful is an adjective.
How do you pronounce threatful?
Threatful is pronounced /ˈθɹɛtfəl/ (UK).

Words near threatful in the dictionary

  1. threateningness
  2. threatenings
  3. threatens
  4. threatensome
  5. threatest
  6. threatful
  7. threatfully
  8. threatfulness
  9. threating
  10. threatless
  11. threatlessness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: threatful (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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