Worry

How to spell worry

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce worry

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does worry mean?

1. verbTo feel or cause to feel anxious or troubled about something.
2. nounA state of anxiety, or a particular cause of unease.

Worry in a sentence

• verb

  Try not to worry about things you cannot change.

• noun

  Money was a constant worry during the recession.

• verb

  The late delivery began to worry the whole team.

• noun

  Her face showed the strain of months of worry.

Where does worry come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word goes back to the Old English verb wyrgan, which meant 'to strangle' or 'to throttle', and which has solid Germanic roots shared with the Dutch worgen and the German würgen, both still meaning 'to choke'. For centuries the sense stayed physical and even violent: a dog was said to worry sheep when it seized them by the throat and shook them, a meaning that survives in country speech today. From that idea of seizing and harassing came the figurative step to 'to harass or pester' a person, and then, by the early 1800s, the now familiar inward sense of 'to feel anxious' or 'to fret'. The journey from gripping a throat to gnawing at one's own peace of mind is a neat picture of how the word turned inward. The spelling can trip writers because the single -rr- sits between two vowels and the ending is the plain -y, not -ey or -ie.

How the word is built

• worry (from Old English wyrgan: to strangle, choke), no separable prefix or suffix in the modern form