panic

1. 1.

   be overcome by a sudden fear

   “The students panicked when told that final exams were less than a week away”

   Broaderfear

   Narrowerfreak out
2. 2.

   cause sudden fear in or fill with sudden panic

   “The mere thought of an isolation cell panicked the prisoners”

   Broaderterrify

Other forms of panic

plural

panics·

past tense or participle

panicked

present participle

panicking

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about panic

What does panic mean?

panic means "an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in panic?

panic has 2 syllables: pan-ic. The stress falls on "pan". In IPA it is /ˈpænɪk/.

What is another word for panic?

Close synonyms include terror, affright, scare. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is panic a common word?

panic is banded "Common" — everyday vocabulary in speech and writing. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with panic?

1 word rhymes with panic. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.