Cruel means deliberately causing pain and not minding — or enjoying it. A cruel remark, cruel to animals, it was a cruel thing to say.
The deliberateness is the whole of it: an accident is not cruel however much it hurts. It is also used of circumstances that feel deliberately unfair — a cruel twist, a cruel winter — where nobody intended anything. Note cruelty, the noun, which is the legal term in animal welfare and family law, and the phrase cruel to be kind, which describes doing something painful for somebody's own good. The comparative is crueller in British spelling and crueler in American.
1adjectivecruelDeliberately causing pain and not caring.
“It was a cruel thing to do and he knew exactly what he was doing.”
2adjectivesufferingCausing suffering, of a situation.
“It was a cruel winter for anybody working outside.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
cruel is a quality of causing pain.
Latin crudelis comes from crudus, raw or bloody — the same root as crude and, at a distance, raw itself. Cruelty is named for the sight of blood rather than for the intention behind it.
Proto-Indo-European
*krewh₂-
Latin
crūdēlis — hard, severe, cruel
Old French
cruel
Middle English
cruel
English, today
cruel
Built from
From Middle English cruel, borrowed from Old French cruel, from Latin crūdēlis (“hard, severe, cruel”), akin to crūdus (“raw, crude”); see crude.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA