Other forms: harassed, harassing, harasses
To harass someone is to keep at them with unwanted pressure until their life is hard to live. Calls from a debt collector at midnight, a manager who comments on a colleague's body every morning, photographers waiting outside a front door for weeks.
Repetition is the whole point: one rude remark is rudeness, the same remark every day is harassment. The noun harassment carries legal weight — sexual harassment, racial harassment, a harassment claim, a restraining order. In military writing, troops harass an enemy with small constant attacks meant to wear them down rather than win. Harassed as an adjective describes the person on the receiving end: a harassed parent with three bags and a pram. Two practical notes — the spelling has one R and two Ss, and the stress splits by country, HARR-uss in Britain and huh-RASS in America.
Old French harasser meant to exhaust, tire out or torment, and behind it sits harer, to set a dog on someone. That came from Frankish hara, the shout used to send a hound after its target. The old picture still fits the word: not one blow, but something loosed on you that keeps coming.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱe
Old French
harasser — to exhaust, tire out, wear out; to harry, torment, vex
English, today
harass
Built from
The verb is derived from Middle French -, Old French harasser (“to exhaust, tire out, wear out; to harry, torment, vex”) (modern French harasser (“to exhaust, tire out, wear out”)), possibly from Old French harer (“to set a dog on”), from Frankish hara (“here, hither”) (a command for a dog to attack), from Proto-Germanic hē₂r (“here, in this place”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ḱe (“here; this”) + ís (“the (person or thing just named)”) + -r. The noun is derived from the verb.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA