Excruciating

How to spell excruciating

12 letters · 5 syllables

How to pronounce excruciating

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does excruciating mean?

1. adjectiveCausing intense physical pain, or by extension being acutely distressing or tedious to endure.

Excruciating in a sentence

• The dentist warned that an abscess can cause excruciating pain.

• She described the migraine as excruciating and could not bear bright light.

Where does excruciating come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb excruciare, meaning 'to torture' or 'to torment severely', which was formed from the intensive prefix ex- (here meaning 'thoroughly') and cruciare, 'to crucify' or 'to put to torture'. At its heart lies the noun crux, meaning 'cross', the same root that gives us 'crucify', 'crucial', and 'crucible'; the original image was the agony of being stretched on a cross. English adopted the word in the late sixteenth century, first to describe literal physical torture and then quickly to mean any pain or distress so intense it feels like torment. That buried 'cruci' from crux is the key to the spelling: remembering the cross hidden inside the word fixes the troublesome -cruci- in the middle.

How the word is built

• ex- (thoroughly, intensive)
• cruci (cross, from Latin crux)
• -ate (verb-forming)
• -ing (adjective/participle suffix)