I can claim some linguistic justification for this, given that the statistical evidence on Oxford’s two-billion-word database of contemporary English, the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), shows that the noun is actually more common, with 9,632 instances, compared with 7,531 for the verb.

The main meaning of the noun is ‘a person or thing that’s a threat or danger to others’: characters is Dennis the Menace.

The thesaurus of synonyms and related words is fully integrated into the dictionary.

Also, why was the tweet described as ‘menacing’ rather than ‘threatening’ or even ‘intimidating’?

While all these three synonyms convey a sense of fear, danger, or unpleasantness being used to achieve an aim, there are some interesting nuances of meaning that differentiate them.

Unlike threaten and intimidate, ‘menace’ can be both a noun and a verb.

Although I want to focus on verbs, as a fan of the British comic , I can’t resist a quick diversion into ‘menace’ as a noun.