Stressed

How to spell stressed

8 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce stressed

What does stressed mean?

1. adjectiveFeeling mental or emotional tension and pressure.
2. verbPast tense of stress: gave special emphasis or importance to something, or subjected something to physical force.

Stressed in a sentence

• adjective

  She felt completely stressed before the job interview.

• verb

  The manager stressed the need to arrive on time every morning.

• adjective

  Working two jobs left him constantly stressed and tired.

• verb

  The report stressed how much the budget had grown.

Where does stressed come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The root noun stress entered English in the 1300s from Old French estresse, meaning 'narrowness' or 'oppression', which traces back to the Vulgar Latin strictia and ultimately to the Latin strictus, the past participle of stringere, meaning 'to draw tight' or 'to bind'. That same stringere also gives us 'strict', 'stringent', and 'constrict', all of which carry the sense of being squeezed or held tightly. In its earliest English use stress described hardship or physical pressure, and the word was partly a shortened form of 'distress'. The modern emotional sense, the feeling of being mentally squeezed, grew from the physics and engineering meaning of a force applied to a material, which was popularised in the twentieth century. The form 'stressed' simply adds the regular -ed ending, and the only real spelling trap is remembering the double s before it.

How the word is built

• stress (from Latin strictus: drawn tight)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)