to be broken, and so to be dismayed: to come apart under pressure, whether a thing that shatters or a person whose courage gives way; and to do this to someone else, to shatter or terrify them.
This word pictures something giving way under force. At its plainest it is physical: ground that cracks open in a drought, a nation broken until it is no longer a people, a bow snapped in the hand. From there the same picture moves inward to describe a person whose nerve breaks: to be dismayed, to lose heart, to be paralyzed by fear. Hebrew often pairs these two together, so the line between a shattered object and a shattered spirit is deliberately thin.
Its most familiar home is the great reassurance of the Bible, the paired command "do not fear and do not be dismayed." Moses says it to Joshua, commanders say it to armies, and God says it to prophets facing hostile crowds. The word names exactly the collapse of courage that the command forbids: not just feeling afraid, but going to pieces and giving up.
The word also works the other way around. With God or an enemy as the one acting, it means to break someone, to shatter their strength or strike them with terror. So the same verb can describe the fear that overwhelms a person and the force that puts that fear in them.
These are not separate words but one connected idea worked out in three directions: things that break, people who break, and the act of breaking either one.