1 ~ sb (with sth) to say that you will cause trouble, hurt sb, etc. if you do not get what you want:
[VN] They broke my windows and threatened me. * The attacker threatened them with a gun. * He was threatened with dismissal if he continued to turn up late for work. * The threatened strike has been called off. * [Vtoinf] The hijackers threatened to kill one passenger every hour if their demands were not met. [also Vthat]
2 to seem likely to happen or cause sth unpleasant:
[V] A storm was threatening. * When war threatens, people act irrationally. * [Vtoinf] This dispute threatens to split the party. * [VN] The clouds threatened rain.
3 [VN] to be a danger to sth:
Pollution along the coastline is threatening marine life.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for threaten is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is threaten a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, threaten is tagged as verb.
Does threaten appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — threaten appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
