Other forms: stressed, stresses, stressing
Stress is the pressure you feel when there is more to deal with than you can deal with. Three deadlines in one week, a phone that will not stop, that tight band across the shoulders at four in the afternoon.
Stress is a verb too, pulling in two directions: I must stress that nothing is decided means say it with force, while stop stressing about the seating plan is the everyday, informal one. Take care with the adjectives, because a stressful job makes you a stressed person, and swapping the two is the commonest mistake anyone makes with this word. Language teachers use stress for the syllable you hit harder: PHOtograph, phoTOGraphy. Engineers use it for force acting on a material, the stress on a cable or a bridge. Stressed out, under stress and stress levels are the phrases you will hear most.
1nounstressWorry and mental pressure caused by a difficult situation.~52%
“The stress of the move showed in every phone call she made that month.”
2nounextraThe extra force put on a syllable or word when speaking.~15%
“In photograph the stress falls on the first syllable.”
3nounactingThe force acting on a material, pushing or pulling it.~29%
“Engineers measure the stress on each cable twice a year.”
4verbspecialTo say something with special force to show that it matters.~2%
“She stressed that the offer would close on Friday and not a day later.”
5verbfeelTo feel worried, or to make someone feel worried.~2%
“Do not stress about the seating plan, nobody will notice.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 14 sentences found in the wild and placed 13 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
stress is a kind of pressure.
Stress is a chopped-off destresse, the Middle English form of distress, from Old French, from Latin distringō, to stretch out. It ran together with another Middle English word, stresse, from Old French estrece, narrowness. The mental sense is recent: stress meant force on an object in physics, and researchers borrowed the metaphor in the 1930s, Hans Selye popularising it in the 1950s.
Latin
distringō
Old French
destrecier
Middle English
destresse
English, today
stress
From Middle English destresse, from Old French destrecier, from Latin distringō. From a shortening of Middle English destresse, borrowed from Old French destrecier, from Latin distringō (“to stretch out”). This form probably coalesced with Middle English stresse, from Old French estrece (“narrowness”), from Vulgar Latin strictia, from Latin strictus (“narrow”). Displaced native Old English swēġ (“accent, stress”), though strictly in the grammatical sense. 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.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA