Sudden, startling fear.
Sudden, startling fear — the brief shock of an abrupt scare.
Set apart above all by abruptness and short duration: fear as a momentary jolt, set off by a specific startling stimulus and fading almost at once (“stage fright,” “took fright”). This contrasts with the slow-building, future-oriented words (worry, anxiety, apprehension, dread). It lacks the reason-disrupting hysteria of panic and the overwhelming extremity of terror, and carries no revulsion (unlike horror). Fear largely displaced fright in the 13th century except in just these cases of sudden scare — its surviving niche.
From Old English (Northumbrian) fryhto, a metathesis of fyrhtu “fear, dread, trembling,” from Proto-Germanic *furkhtaz “afraid” (cf. German Furcht). Notably NOT related to fear, despite the two being near-synonyms.
Once a principal word for fear, fright was largely superseded by fear in the 13th century, surviving thereafter chiefly “in cases of sudden terror” — which fixed its modern sense of an abrupt scare. No recent-generation shift is sourced.