Stressful

How to spell stressful

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce stressful

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does stressful mean?

1. adjectiveCausing mental or emotional pressure, worry, or strain.

Stressful in a sentence

• Moving house and starting a new job in the same week was incredibly stressful.

• She left the stressful trading floor for a quieter role in research.

Where does stressful come from?

Language of origin: French

The base noun 'stress' arrived in English in the 1300s from Old French 'estresse', meaning 'narrowness' or 'oppression', which grew out of the Vulgar Latin 'strictia' and ultimately the Latin verb 'stringere', 'to draw tight' or 'to bind'. The earliest English senses were physical: hardship, constraint, and the literal force that squeezes or pulls on a material. The word was also reinforced by 'distress', a close relative from the same Latin root, which is why the two share that tight 'str' cluster. The familiar emotional meaning, mental or psychological pressure, became common only in the twentieth century, especially through medicine and psychology. The adjective 'stressful' simply adds the native English suffix '-ful', meaning 'full of', and the one spelling trap worth remembering is that '-ful' as a suffix always takes a single 'l', never the double 'l' of the standalone word 'full'.

How the word is built

• stress (strain, pressure)
• -ful (full of, characterised by)