Worries

How to spell worries

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce worries

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does worries mean?

1. nounThings that cause anxiety or unease; troubling concerns.
2. verbFeels anxious or troubled, said of one other person.

Worries in a sentence

• noun

  My biggest worries is the rising cost of rent.

• verb

  He always worries about money before payday.

• noun

  Their financial worries kept them awake at night.

• verb

  She worries about her elderly parents constantly.

Where does worries come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word traces back to the Old English verb wyrgan, which literally meant 'to strangle' or 'to throttle', a strikingly physical sense quite unlike the modern emotional one. The same Germanic root gave related words in Dutch (worgen) and German (würgen), both still carrying the idea of choking. In medieval English the verb shifted to mean seizing by the throat, as a dog 'worries' a sheep, and from there to the figurative sense of harassing, troubling, or vexing someone. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meaning had softened further into the familiar idea of mental anxiety, both feeling troubled and gnawing at the mind. The noun for an anxious thought is younger still, and the plural and third-person form 'worries' simply takes 'worry' and turns the final y into ies, the regular spelling rule that catches people who expect a plain s.

How the word is built

• worr- (from Old English wyrgan: to strangle, throttle)
• -ies (the y of 'worry' changing to i before the -es ending)