apprehensive
adjective
Henry Petroski
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How has the meaning of apprehensive changed over time?
When Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar “And men are flesh and blood, and apprehensive,” he was not using the word apprehensive with the meaning which we so often encounter today (“viewing the future with anxiety or alarm”). The Bard was using the word’s older meaning of “capable of understanding or quick to do so” or “showing insight and understanding.” Apprehensive has shifted its meaning considerably in the seven hundred or so years it has been inhabiting our language. Its earliest meanings had to do with apprehension, to be sure, but it was apprehension meaning “the act of learning,” (a sense that is now obsolete) or “the act or faculty or grasping with the intellect.” The words apprehensive and apprehension both have roots in the Latin words prehendere meaning “to seize.”
Examples of apprehensive in a Sentence
Andrew Caffrey, Boston Sunday Globe, 2 Oct. 2005
… Sargent, a shrewder character, was apprehensive about how the portrait would be viewed by the conventional crowds for whom a day out at the Salon was a social fixture in the Paris calendar. He was right. The public saw nothing lovely in this pallid, long- nosed woman with her prominent chin and superior smile.
—Miranda Seymour, New York Times Book Review, 28 Sept. 2003
I arrived at my first Lamaze class the same way I showed up for my baby showers and ob-gyn appointments: a little excited, a little apprehensive, but mostly obediently, because it's what you're supposed to do when you're pregnant.
—Paula Spencer, Parenting, April 1997
I'm fully apprehensive of the options, I assure you.
Philip Marcelo, Los Angeles Times, 20 June 2025
Many in the village are excited for the apprehensive Spike, as this is a rite of passage, but Jamie is reminded by a woman at the gate on their way out that 14 or 15 is the typical age for this experience.
—Mark Meszoros, Boston Herald, 19 June 2025
But those who have been around since the beginning might be extra apprehensive until the prize is sealed.
—Anthony Slater, New York Times, 19 June 2025
And with the Trump administration taking a blunderbuss to anything that remotely resembles DEI, the mood across the entertainment industries is generally apprehensive.
—Zak Cheney-Rice, Vulture, 2 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for apprehensive
Cite this Entry
“Apprehensive.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apprehensive. Accessed 11 Jul. 2025.
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apprehensive
adjective
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