alarm

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Making people sad, shocked and upset
aback
amiss
appal
be laughing on the other side of your faceidiom
bite
bum
gnaw
haunt
heartbreaker
heartbreakingly
hit/touch a (raw) nerveidiom
nerve
self-laceration
sensitivity
shake someone out of something
shake someone up
shake/rock something to its foundationsidiom
shattering
tear
toxic

horrify | American Dictionary

horrify
verb[ T ]
us/ˈhɔr·əˌfɑɪ, ˈhɑr-/
to cause someone to experience shock, fear, or disgust:
The public was horrified by the amount of pollution in the lake.
fig. He was horrified to find that I had never been to a county fair.

horrifying

adjectiveus/ˈhɔr·əˌfɑɪ·ɪŋ, ˈhɑr-/
We saw some horrifying pictures of the effects of the storm.

Examples of horrify

horrify
He would have been horrified at the suggestion that economics was "built on broad ethical foundations" (2005: 225).
He was horrified by her question and shamed her, threatening to tell her parents if she ever mentioned it again.
The audience reaction is subjective, amused, fascinated, delighted, horrified, just like the feathered watchers in the border.
In fact, he was horrified at the theoretical emphasis and fragmentation of all musical study.
I am not sure whether to be horrified by this trend, or to applaud it.
It would also seek to impose a degree of ideological control which would have startled and probably horrified the humanist intellectuals of the sixteenth century.
She recognises that both writers have contributed to our ' horrified fascination ' and ' cultural fears ' of growing old (p. x).
When read from the perspective of virtuous aesthetic activity, his work generates only weary acceptance or horrified denial.
I'm sure the author would have been horrified to have known the effect that had been given.
They are horrifying, furthermore, precisely because they are seen to occupy the border between human and nonhuman.
She was horrified to see thousands, who doubtless had once sat and cheered her, homeless and hungry.
It is horrified and its calculations are confounded by the solidity of these enormous masses opposed to their accumulated ruins.
While he might have understood better than many the inherent difficulty of combining absolute sovereignty with mixed constitutionalism, his contemporaries were nevertheless horrified.
It is always intriguing, and occasionally horrifying, to see what one has written refracted through another person's eyes.
Though it made for thrilling newspaper copy, an expectant public were horrified by the tragedy; sensational news was soon followed by bitter charges and debates.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.