fear the worst – English Grammar Profiler

Here’s an example of a C2 phrase in the English Vocabulary Profile that means:

worry that something very bad will happen or that something very bad has happened

We fear the worst.

TED

A search for collocates of ‘fear the worst‘ in the NOW corpus:

1 COME 126 2 YET 114 3 BEGAN 59

4 EXPERTS 31

Experts initially feared the worst.

theinformant.co.nz

5 STARTED 27 6 MAKES 24 7 REASON 23 8 FANS 23 9 STARTING 19

10 BEGINNING 16