deters

Deters is the third-person singular present tense of the verb deter. It means to discourage someone from taking a particular action by making the costs or risks seem undesirable. Deters is typically used with an object describing the action to be avoided, as in “the threat of punishment deters crime” or “advertising aims to deter theft.” The standard construction is “deter someone from doing something,” for example, “the policy deters people from littering.”

Deter is commonly used in policy, law enforcement, criminology, business, and everyday speech. Related forms include deterring (present participle) and detered (less common spelling; the correct past tense is deterred). The term often appears alongside the noun deterrence or the adjective deterrent, which describe the broader mechanisms or tools that deter.

Etymology traces deter to Latin detellēre? or deterrēre, from de- + terrēre, meaning to frighten away. It entered English via Old French, evolving into the current meaning of discouraging action through perceived costs or risks.

In usage, deter emphasizes discouragement by signaling consequences rather than removing options. In criminology and security contexts, deterrence theory focuses on factors such as certainty, severity, and swiftness of punishment as influences on behavior, with deterrence being achieved when potential wrongdoers perceive enough cost to abandon the action.