Other forms: hurts, hurting
Hurt is what you feel when something has damaged you — a knee that will not take your weight, or a remark that lands badly. A hurt shoulder after a fall on the ice; a hurt look when nobody saves you a seat.
The same four letters do the past tense: I hurt my back on Sunday, and it has hurt ever since — there is no hurted. It runs in both directions, so a person can be hurt and a body part can hurt, and the thing doing the damage can take the front seat: those shoes hurt. The feelings sense is quieter and sadder than angry, and hurt feelings are not a small matter. There is a noun as well, the hurt in her voice, which belongs to careful writing rather than everyday talk. And in the set phrase it wouldn't hurt to ask, no pain is involved at all.
1adjectivehurtSuffering pain or damage in the body.~11%
“She was hurt in the crash but walked away from it.”
synonyms: wounded, sore
2adjectiveupsetUpset by what someone has said or done.~2%
“He looked hurt when nobody laughed.”
3verbcauseTo cause pain or injury to someone or something.~54%
“Careful — you will hurt your hand on that edge.”
4verbfeelTo feel pain.~11%
“My throat hurts every time I swallow.”
5nounemotionalEmotional pain.~22%
“There was old hurt underneath the joke.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 9 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: injured
Hurt began as a collision. Middle English hurten came from Old French hurter, to ram into or strike — the ancestor of modern French heurter — and that may go back to Frankish *hūrt, a battering ram, with cousins in Welsh and Cornish meaning ram. English kept the damage and dropped the crash.
Frankish
*hūrt — a battering ram
fro-nor
hurter
Middle English
hurten
English, today
hurt
Built from
From Middle English hurten, hirten, hertan (“to injure, scathe, knock together”), from fro-nor hurter "to ram into, strike, collide with"; > Modern French heurter, perhaps from Frankish hūrt (“a battering ram”), cognate with Welsh hwrdd (“ram”) and kw hordh (“ram”). Compare Proto-Germanic hrūtaną, hreutaną (“to fall, beat”), from Proto-Indo-European krew- (“to fall, beat, smash, strike, break”); however, the earliest instances of the verb in Middle English are as old as those found in Old French, which leads to the possibility that the Middle English word may instead be a reflex of an unrecorded Old English hyrtan, which later merged with the Old French verb. Germanic cognates include Dutch horten (“to push against, strike”), Middle Low German hurten (“to run at, collide with”), Middle High German hurten (“to push, bump, attack, storm, invade”), Old Norse hrútr (“battering ram”). Alternate etymology traces fro-nor hurter rather to Old Norse hrútr (“ram (male sheep)”), lengthened-grade variant of hjǫrtr (“stag”), from Proto-Germanic herutuz, herutaz (“hart, male deer”), which would relate it to English hart (“male deer”). See hart.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA