stress - Wiktionary, the free dictionary (original) (raw)

From Wiktionary, the free dictionary

From a shortening of Middle English destresse, borrowed from Old French destrecier, from Latin distringō (“to stretch out”).[1] This form probably coalesced with Middle English stresse, from Old French estrece (“narrowness”), from Vulgar Latin *strictia, from Latin strictus (“narrow”).

In the sense of "mental strain" or “disruption”, used occasionally in the 1920s and 1930s by psychologists, including Walter Cannon (1934); in “biological threat”, used by endocrinologist Hans Selye, by metaphor with stress in physics (force on an object) in the 1930s, and popularized by same in the 1950s.

stress (countable and uncountable, plural stresses)

  1. (biology) A physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism.
  2. (biology) Aggression toward an organism resulting in a response in an attempt to restore previous conditions.
  3. (countable, physics) The internal distribution of force across a small boundary per unit area of that boundary (pressure) within a body. It causes strain or deformation and is typically symbolised by σ or τ.
    Hyponyms: tensile stress, σ, shear stress, τ
    Coordinate terms: strain, deformation, force, pressure
  4. (countable, physics) Force externally applied to a body which cause internal stress within the body.
  5. (uncountable) Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal.
    Go easy on him, he's been under a lot of stress lately.
    • 2024 December 16, Amanda M. Y. Chu, Damen H. Y. Woo, Agnes Tiwari, Helina Yuk, Mike K. P. So, “Which types of family caregivers are more prone to developing depression? Leveraging non-financial social support to mitigate depression”, in Current Psychology, →DOI:
      Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional model of stress and coping describes psychological stress as “a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well-being” (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, p.19). According to these authors, the essence of inducing stress is how a person appraises the situation and whether he or she has the physical and mental ability to cope with the problem.
  6. (countable, phonetics, loosely) A suprasegmental feature of a language having additional attention raised to a sound, word or word group by means of of loudness, duration or pitch; phonological prominence.
    Synonyms: emphasis, accent
    lexical stress; phrase stress, prosodic stress
    Some people put the stress on the first syllable of “controversy”; others put it on the second.
  7. (countable, phonetics, strictly) The suprasegmental feature of a language having additional attention raised to a sound by means of loudness and/or duration; phonological prominence phonetically achieved by means of dynamics as distinct from pitch.
    Synonym: stress accent
    Antonyms: pitch, pitch accent
    • 2020 July 9, Steve Rapaport, “Parallel syncretism in early Indo-European”, in Bridget Drinka, editor, Historical Linguistics 2017: Selected Papers from the 23rd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, San Antonio, Texas, 31 July – 4 August 2017, →DOI, page 59:
      The shift from pitch to stress appears to happen before the other obliques begin merging in the Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic, Primitive Irish, and Middle Indo-Aryan. But further investigation into the timeline of sound changes […] shows that, at least in Germanic, the oblique and core noun stems sound quite unpredictably different in all these families by the time of the crucial accent shift from pitch to stress. […] once a language becomes stress-sensitive, there seems to be a strong tendency in early Indo-European languages to shift the stress to the first syllable. This change happens shortly after the change to stress accent in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic, and Proto-Celtic, and even Thessalian, with evidence from Dybo's Law and Verner's Law left behind to show that sound changes happened after the changes to stress accent.
  8. (uncountable) Emphasis placed on a particular point in an argument or discussion (whether spoken or written).
  9. Obsolete form of distress.
  10. (Scots law) distress; the act of distraining; also, the thing distrained.

(physics) internal force across a boundary per area — see also tension

emotional pressure

on a phonological segment — see accent

on a point in an argument — see also emphasis

stress (third-person singular simple present stresses, present participle stressing, simple past and past participle stressed)

  1. (transitive) To apply force to (a body or structure) causing strain.
  2. (transitive) To apply emotional pressure to (a person or animal).
  3. (intransitive, informal) To suffer stress; to worry or be agitated.
  4. (transitive) To emphasise (a syllable of a word).
    “Emphasis” is stressed on the first syllable, but “emphatic” is stressed on the second.
  5. (transitive) To emphasise (words in speaking).
  6. (transitive) To emphasise (a point) in an argument or discussion.
    I must stress that this information is given in strict confidence.

to apply emotional pressure to

to emphasise (a syllable)

to emphasise (words in speaking)

  1. ^ Keil, R.M.K. (2004) Coping and stress: a conceptual analysis Journal of Advanced Nursing, 45(6), 659–665

Borrowed from English stress.

stress c or n (singular definite stressen or stresset, not used in plural)

  1. stress

Borrowed from English stress.

stress m (uncountable, no diminutive)

  1. stress

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

stress

  1. inflection of stressen:
    1. first-person singular present indicative
    2. (in case of inversion) second-person singular present indicative
    3. imperative

Borrowed from English stress.

stress m (uncountable)

  1. stress (emotional pressure)

Borrowed from English stress.

stress n (genitive singular **stress, no plural)

  1. stress

stress (plural **stress-stress)

  1. nonstandard spelling of stres

stress (comparative lebih stress, superlative paling stress)

  1. nonstandard spelling of stres

Borrowed from English stress.

stress m (invariable)

  1. stress

Borrowed from English stress.

stress

  1. imperative of stresse

stress m (plural stresses)

  1. alternative form of estresse
  2. alternative form of stresse

Unadapted borrowing from English stress.

stress m (plural stresses)

  1. stress
    Synonym: estrés

According to Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) prescriptions, unadapted foreign words should be written in italics in a text printed in roman type, and vice versa, and in quotation marks in a manuscript text or when italics are not available. In practice, this RAE prescription is not always followed.

Borrowed from English stress. First attested in the 1950s.

stress c (uncountable)

  1. stress