The word "gripped" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to describe a feeling that a person has when they are overwhelmed with fear, anxiety, or shock. Example sentence: When I saw the accident, I was gripped with fear.
It was 3.30am when the cold terror gripped.
There was seldom a story in Dutch news that so gripped and for so long dominated the public sphere as the kidnapping of Freddy Heineken, the president of Heineken International.
The notion that England now is shuddering in the same sort of anticipation gripped both of our imaginations.
Many Turkish newsrooms resemble an open prison rather than a creative hive and fear has gripped those of the so-called mainstream media institutions.
The needle came out, my mouth was numbed, then the silent assistant stood behind me and gripped me in a headlock as the dentist reached in with his pliers and pulled, left, right, left, right, left right… I sat in a state of swimmy shock, zooming between the present day and my traumatic memories of the 80s.
One source familiar with the process told the Guardian: "Preparations to commemorate VE Day had been trundling along in Whitehall when No 10, or the top system, suddenly woke up to the fact that this needed to be gripped.
As such, his sensibility was gripped by opium, which was administered to him as a chewy paste by a certain Dr Moreau, who had travelled in the Orient and was curious about the effect of this narcotic on the cultivated western mind.
Though almost all eyes are turned northwards, where Islamists Boko Haram have waged a bloody six-year battle, complex ethnic and political rivalries in the south magnified by elections could reignite fighting that once gripped Nigeria.
89d768d1-5703-4523-acd4-dd18366317d8 The dentist's assistant had me gripped in a headlock when I fell into a reverie.
The sectarian civil war that gripped Iraq around 2006 was precipitated to a large extent by this development.
Two books that have gripped me this year share the same translator: the excellent Philip Boehm.
