discomfort
noun · verb
Simple meaning
An uncomfortable feeling of mental painfulness or distress.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
dihskuhmfertSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
dɪsˈkʌmfɚt
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
An uncomfortable feeling of mental painfulness or distress
Mental or bodily distress.
Something that disturbs one's comfort; an annoyance.
verb
To cause annoyance or distress to.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: An uncomfortable feeling of mental painfulness or distress
Used this way, discomfort is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly unfavourable pull. It sounds natural in ordinary conversation and in expressive writing alike.
- Emotional tone
- Negative
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Serious and weighty
- Usage feel
- Everyday but emotionally strong
Nearby words
- tenderness , a specialist term, precise but narrower
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use discomfort
- “Wearing new shoes often causes some discomfort until they are broken in.”noun
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.