terror [LME] Like terrible [LME], terror comes from Latin terrere ‘to frighten’. The Terror was the period of the French Revolution, from about March 1793 to July 1794, marked by extreme repression and bloodshed. The expression reign of terror, which may now be applied to any brutal exercise of power, was originally coined to describe this time. Terrorist also has links with this period, as the word was originally used to describe the Jacobins, the revolutionary group who were responsible for the repression and executions of the Terror. Terrible once meant ‘causing terror or awe’, a meaning reflected in the name of the feared 16th-century tsar of Russia Ivan the Terrible. The weakened sense ‘very bad, appalling’ gradually evolved from the start of the 17th century. Today parents talk of the terrible twos, a period in a child’s development around the age of two that often involves defiant or challenging behaviour. The term is first found in the title of a film produced in 1950 for the Department of National Health and Welfare in Canada, called The Terrible Twos and the Trusting Threes.