Both words refer to someone or something that poses a danger to us. A threat in this sense is not the verbal warning (Is that a threat?), but something that jeopardizes, or could jeopardize, life, peace, health, or other desirable conditions currently intact: a threat to national security. Menace can be a strong synonym for threat, when the harm is imminent or even already occurring, as with the menace of crime, corruption, pollution, and stray dogs.The difference in meaning can be seen in the verbs that typically precede each word. We want to eliminate a threat before the harm comes to pass, but a menace already has a troubling presence we tackle, curb, deal with, or eradicate. Gang culture is a threat to the community, whereas the presence of gangs has become or is a menace.

Both words refer to something horrifying and repellent—especially acts and images of violence and death, with no gore spared. Gruesome comes from a Germanic word for “shudder.” It suggests something graphic that evokes a visceral response. Macabre is a strong synonym for gruesome: a gruesome murder could also be described as macabre murder. However, macabre tends to describe things less tangible than gore, like an atmosphere, a mood, or an artistic or literary representation of something horrible. We can compare these typical uses: gruesome photos and gruesome video; macabre tale and macabre movie. Macabre is frequently paired with dark, bizarre, strange, and grotesque.

Both words refer to the act of misleading, tricking, or deceiving someone, usually for one’s own advantage or gain. Deception is the broader term, covering all ways of misleading people, from false appearances to lies: deception in advertising. Subterfuge is a category of deception that involves the use of cunning tricks or stratagems in order to get away with something. Subterfuge emphasizes the tricks themselves, particularly tricks that (like a smoke screen) hide or disguise what is actually going on: Going out would require subterfuge, so I set my music player to start one hour after I’d slipped out through my bedroom window. Politics, not espionage, is by far the most frequent context for subterfuge.