- 1嚇一跳、使受驚（是瞬間的小驚嚇，不是真的害怕；「別嚇我」的那種嚇）
To give someone a sudden small shock — the jump you make when a door bangs behind you or a cat leaps out of a bush. The key is that it is sudden and brief, and much milder than 'frighten' or 'scare': being startled lasts a second, and afterwards you often laugh. It is normally the thing that startles you, and it very often happens without anyone meaning it: 'Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you' is what you say when you have walked up quietly behind a colleague. It is used a lot of animals, which are startled by noise and then run. In the passive — 'I was startled by the news' — it shifts slightly towards 'surprised and rather shaken', with no physical jump involved. It is a slightly word; in everyday talk many people just say 'You scared me!' even when they only mean startled. There is also a rarer noun 'startle', mostly in technical writing about the reflex ('the startle response').
組成From Old English steartlian 'to kick, struggle, stumble', made from 'start' plus the ending -le, which in old verbs suggests a small or repeated action. The link is real: 'start' itself once meant to jump or move suddenly — a meaning still alive in 'She sat up with a start'.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
startleverb/ˈstɑːt(ə)l/
- 1
To move suddenly, or be excited, on feeling alarm; to start.
- a horse that startles easily
- Why shrinks the soul / Back on herself, and startles at destruction?
- 2
To excite by sudden alarm, surprise, or apprehension; to frighten suddenly and not seriously; to alarm; to surprise.
- The supposition, at least, that angels do sometimes assume bodies need not startle us.
- Nothing could startle her, make her scold or make her cry. She did not complain, she did not rebel.
- 3
obsoleteTo deter; to cause to deviate.
- it would blast all their hopes, and startle all other princes from joining
- As they turned into Hertford Street they startled a robin from the poet's head on a barren fountain, and he fled away with a cameo note.
startlenoun/ˈstɑːt(ə)l/
- 1
A sudden motion or shock caused by an unexpected alarm, surprise, or apprehension of danger.
- The figure of a man heaving in sight amidst these wide solitudes, always causes a startle and thrill of expectation and doubt, similar to the feeling produced by the announcement of " a strange sail ahead" on shipboard, during a long voyage.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。