Skip to main content
PlainSpell

frightmare

noun

frightmare is a noun meaning “Someone or something extremely unattractive” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled F-R-I-G-H-T-M-A-R-E, and it appears about once in every 78 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of frightmare is frightmares.

What does frightmare mean?

noun

  1. 1

    informalSomeone or something extremely unattractive.

  2. 2

    An extremely unpleasant and frightening experience.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

Forms of frightmare

  • frightmares plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is frightmare?

Frightmare appears about once in every 78 million words in written English, the 279,513th most frequent word form in the list.

Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).

Where does frightmare come from?

Blend of fright + nightmare.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).