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.
Kyle Denis, Billboard, 1 May 2025
Amazon’s analysts on Wall Street, meanwhile, are apprehensive about the company’s entrance into the market.
—Jackie Wattles, CNN Money, 29 Apr. 2025
Given the franchise’s track record when drafting in the upper reaches of the lottery, save for the most recent examples of Brandon Miller and LaMelo Ball, Hornets fans are a tad apprehensive and skeptical.
—Roderick Boone, Charlotte Observer, 24 Apr. 2025
Once tense and apprehensive, Mateo is later shown basking in the sun and running along the sand with other dogs in the care of his rescuer.
—Thomas G. Moukawsher, MSNBC Newsweek, 17 Apr. 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 10 May. 2025.
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apprehensive
adjective
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