Other forms: traumas
Trauma is lasting psychological harm left by a deeply distressing experience. Childhood trauma, process the trauma, a traumatic event.
The plural is traumas or traumata, and the adjective is traumatic. In medicine trauma means physical injury — a trauma surgeon, the trauma ward — and that is the older meaning of the two. Note post-traumatic stress disorder, the clinical diagnosis, and that trauma has spread rapidly in casual speech to mean any bad experience, which clinicians resist because it blurs a term that has to carry diagnostic weight.
1nountraumaLasting psychological harm from a distressing event.
“The trauma surfaced twenty years later.”
2nounseriousSerious physical injury.
“She works in the trauma unit at the city hospital.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
trauma is a wound or lasting harm.
Ancient Greek trauma meant a wound, plainly and physically. Medicine kept that sense; psychoanalysis borrowed it as a metaphor in the nineteenth century, and the metaphor has now largely eclipsed the original in everyday English.
Ancient Greek
τραῦμα
English, today
trauma
From Ancient Greek τραῦμα. From Ancient Greek τραῦμα (“wound, damage”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA