Traumatic means so distressing that it leaves lasting damage. A traumatic experience, traumatic injury, deeply traumatic.
In medicine it means caused by physical injury — traumatic brain injury is a blow to the head — and in psychology it means an event that overwhelms the ability to cope. The word is used loosely for anything unpleasant, which drains it. The Greek means a wound.
1adjectivetraumaticSo distressing that it leaves lasting damage.
“Losing her home in the fire was a traumatic experience for the young girl.”
traumatic is a quality of harm.
Greek traumatikos comes from trauma, a wound. The psychological sense is nineteenth-century.
Ancient Greek
τραυματικός
Latin
traumaticus
English, today
traumatic
From the Latin traumaticus, from the Ancient Greek τραυματικός, from τραῦμα. by surface analysis, trauma + -tic.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA