/ˈpænɪk/
[noun] A sudden feeling of great fear that makes it hard to think clearly or act in a calm way. It can affect one person or spread quickly through a crowd.
Panic is named after Pan, a Greek god whose unexpected appearances in the forest were said to cause sudden, overwhelming terror.
The word 'panic' takes us all the way back to ancient Greece and to one of its strangest and most fascinating gods: Pan. Pan was the god of the wild, of shepherds and flocks, of nature and rustic music. He was depicted as half-man, half-goat — with the legs, horns, and beard of a goat and the torso of a man. He was not a god of great battles or royal courts, but of lonely mountain paths, shadowy forests, and the deep silence of the countryside at noon.
According to Greek belief, Pan had a habit of sleeping during the midday heat, and he was extremely irritable when disturbed. If a traveller or a herd of animals stumbled too close and woke him, he would let out a terrifying cry — a sound so sudden and so unearthly that it caused immediate, uncontrollable terror in anyone who heard it. This irrational, groundless fear — fear with no visible enemy, no logical cause — became known in Greek as 'panikon deima', meaning 'the fear of Pan'. The adjective form was 'panikos', meaning 'of or belonging to Pan'.
From Greek 'panikos', the word passed into Latin as 'panicus', still carrying the meaning of this sudden, god-sent terror. In Latin texts, writers used 'panicus terror' to describe the kind of fear that sweeps through soldiers without warning — the kind that causes an army to flee in disorder even when there is no real danger. This military connection is important, because it shaped how the word was first used in English.
The word entered English in the early 17th century, borrowed directly from the French 'panique', which had come from Latin 'panicus'. At first, English writers used the phrase 'panic terror' or 'panic fear' — keeping the adjective form that pointed clearly back to Pan. Over time, the phrase was shortened, and by the mid-1600s 'panic' was being used on its own as a noun. By the 18th century, it had also become a verb — 'to panic' — meaning to feel or cause this sudden, uncontrollable fear.
What makes 'panic' so interesting is how completely its divine origins have faded. Today, almost no one using the word thinks of a goat-legged god sleeping in a Greek forest. The word has become entirely secular — we talk about panic attacks, financial panic, panic buttons — and yet every single time we say it, we are secretly invoking the spirit of Pan, the wild god of ancient Greece whose unexpected shout could make even the bravest person run. Language has preserved the myth long after the myth has been forgotten.