surprise

1. 1.

   cause to be surprised

   “The news really surprised me”

   Broaderaffect

   Narroweramazeexplode a bombshellcatchflabbergastshock
2. 2.

   come upon or take unawares

   “She surprised the couple”

   “He surprised an interesting scene”

   Broaderact

   Narrowerblindside
3. 3.

   attack by storm; attack suddenly

   Synonymsstorm

   Broaderattack

Other forms of surprise

plural

surprises·

past tense

surprised·

present participle

surprising·

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 surprise

What does surprise mean?

surprise means "the astonishment you feel when something totally unexpected happens to you". That is the primary sense; the word has 6 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in surprise?

surprise has 2 syllables: sur-prise. The stress falls on "prise". In IPA it is /sɚˈpɹaɪz/.

What is another word for surprise?

Close synonyms include surprisal, storm. 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 surprise a common word?

surprise is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. 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 surprise?

5 words rhyme with surprise. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.