Bedrohliche

Bedrohliche is a German adjective meaning “threatening” or “dangerous” in the sense of indicating the potential to cause harm. It is formed from the verb bedrohen (to threaten) with the suffix -lich, a productive German suffix that creates adjectives describing qualities. The form bedrohliche is used in attributive position before a noun, and its ending changes according to gender, number, and case.

Examples illustrate its common usage. Eine bedrohliche Lage is feminine singular in the nominative after an indefinite article; die bedrohliche Lage uses the definite article in the same case. In the plural, after a definite article or other determiner, the ending becomes -en: die bedrohlichen Lagen. Without a determiner, or after a possessive with no strong article, the strong ending yields bedrohliche Geräusche (neuter plural) or bedrohliche Lagen (feminine plural), indicating generic or unspecified examples.

In contrast, when used predicatively after a linking verb, the base form bedrohlich is typically used rather than bedrohliche: Die Situation ist bedrohlich. The attributive bedrohliche and the predicative bedrohlich share the same root meaning, but they appear in different syntactic positions and inflection patterns.

Common collocations include bedrohliche Wetterlage, bedrohliche Entwicklungen, and bedrohliche Geräusche, which are frequently found in news reports, analyses, and descriptive writing. The term is neutral and widely understood in everyday German, without specialized technical meaning beyond the general sense of danger or threat. See also related terms such as bedrohen (to threaten) and bedrohlich (threatening in a general, non-attributive sense).