dread

I dread to think

It is too worrying or unpleasant for me to think about something that might happen or might have happened. I dread to think what my boss will say when I tell him I lost our biggest client.
See also: dread, think
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

I shudder/dread to ˈthink (how, what, etc....)

(informal, often humorous) I am afraid to think or ask myself about something, because the answer might be terrible or unpleasant: I shudder to think when he last had a bath. ‘How much more work is there?’ ‘I dread to think!’
See also: dread, shudder, think
Farlex Partner Idioms Dictionary
See also:
  • I dread to think
  • I shudder/dread to think
  • I shudder to think
  • shudder
  • think out of the box
  • think back
  • go against the flow
  • What are you on?
  • never in a month of Sundays
  • What color is the sun in your world?
References in periodicals archive
Cloth, $22.50--This engrossing book explores the human experience of evil and locates its ground in "an experience of dread almost beyond words," arguing that the evil we do is "an attempt to master the experience by inflicting it on others" (p.
Before male philosophers explicated dread in abstract terms, female novelists explored the dread generated by women's dependent and confined lives, at least as early as Ann Radcliffe in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
The holiday nightmare can begin as soon as women set foot on the plane, with one in five saying they dread fitting into tight airline seats, according to the research for Slimming World.
But they can relate to somebody coming out because that person is dealing with a nameless dread, at least from a straight point of view.
Animals, such as household pets, dogs and puppies, cats and kittens, dread, simply dread, the loud deafening bangs and cower away in terror.
One parent told me in a focus group this year that what worried her most about the religious ed program at their parish wasn't the content, but that her kids dread going every week.
Indeed, some think the dread disease of unwarranted optimism is a killer.
I don't know what Meadville means, but I think the reason I've played it more than any other music released in 1997 is that when Thomas' joke is at its best, especially then, the music is all about uncertainty, about dread, a dread that spins the present into the future.
According to Morrison, the formation of an Africanist presence seems to have followed a roughly three-part development: "from its simplistic, though menacing, purposes of establishing hierarchic difference, to its surrogate properties as self-reflexive meditations on the loss of difference, to its lush and fully blossomed existence in the rhetoric of dread and desire" (64).
First, refugees from Haiti and Cuba are people of color, and behind the dread of refugees--indeed, behind the anti-immigration movement as a whole--is a huge boulder of racism.
Each day's mobilization was an exercise in dread and exhaustion-dread that our voices would fall on deaf ears, dread of an unexpected voting, dread that so few would be allowed inside.
Poets' corner HOMELESS REVISITED I write again about their plight The forgotten ones who dread the night Those poor souls, who have no home, And alien streets are forced to roam Some bond together to form a group Others, perhaps loners and not in the "loop" They will be thinking of what lies ahead Does anyone care if they're alive or dead?
And more than half even dread having to swop their winter clothes for skimpy summer outfits.
Why didn't we dread coming home like everyone else?
You'd better land this one, son, or it's three dread lashings for you!