menace [ME] The root of menace is Latin minae ‘threats’. The original English sense, which survives mainly in legal contexts, was also ‘a threat’—the Larceny Act of 1861 made it a criminal offence to demand money with menaces, and the phrase has been used in subsequent Acts dealing with similar offences. In the sense ‘a person or thing that threatens danger or catastrophe’, menace is recorded from the mid 19th century, but has since progressively weakened to mean ‘an inconvenience, an annoyance, a nuisance’. There are two cartoon characters called Dennis the Menace: the British Dennis is in a strip cartoon and made his first appearance in issue 452 of the comic the Beano on 17 March 1951. The American Dennis is a character in a single-cell cartoon and appeared just five days earlier in sixteen American newspapers.