Hurtful

How to spell hurtful

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hurtful

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hurtful mean?

1. adjectiveCausing emotional pain or distress to someone.

Hurtful in a sentence

• His hurtful remarks about her work left the whole team uneasy.

• She apologised for the hurtful tone of her earlier email.

Where does hurtful come from?

Language of origin: French

The base word hurt arrived in English from the Old French verb hurter, which meant 'to strike, knock against, or collide with'. The precise source of that Old French verb is uncertain, though many scholars suspect a Germanic origin, perhaps from a root meaning 'to butt' like a ram; for this reason the deepest origin is best treated as not fully settled. English borrowed hurt in the 1200s, and the sense slid from the idea of a physical collision toward the broader meanings of wounding the body and, later, wounding the feelings. The adjective hurtful was then built inside English by adding the native suffix -ful, literally 'full of hurt', a pattern shared with words like harmful and painful. Because -ful as a word ending always carries a single l (unlike the standalone word full), that single l is the small spelling point worth remembering.

How the word is built

• hurt (to cause pain or injury)
• -ful (full of, adjective suffix)