Painful

How to spell painful

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce painful

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does painful mean?

1. adjectiveCausing physical hurt or emotional distress.
2. adjectiveTediously difficult or awkward to do or endure.

Painful in a sentence

• The injection was less painful than she had expected.

• Reconciling the accounts was a slow and painful process.

• Recalling the argument was still painful months later.

• The meeting dragged on with painful silences between speakers.

Where does painful come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word builds on 'pain', which English took from Old French 'peine', meaning suffering or punishment, in the 1200s. That French word descended from the Latin 'poena', which literally meant a penalty or punishment imposed for a wrong, and Latin in turn had borrowed it from the Greek 'poine', meaning a fine or blood-price paid for a crime. So the earliest idea behind the word was punishment rather than bodily hurt, and you can still hear that origin in relatives like 'penalty', 'penal', and 'subpoena'. By the time English added the native suffix '-ful', meaning 'full of', the sense had shifted toward the modern one: full of pain, whether of the body or the feelings. The single 'l' in 'painful' often trips writers, because '-ful' as a suffix always keeps just one 'l', even though the standalone word 'full' has two.

How the word is built

• pain (from Latin poena: penalty, punishment)
• -ful (full of, characterised by)