hurt
verb · adjective · noun
Simple meaning
To cause physical pain and/or injury.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
hurtIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈhɝt
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.
verb
transitiveintransitive
To cause (a person or animal) physical pain and/or injury.
Feel pain or be in pain
“Were you hurting after the accident?”
Cause emotional anguish or make miserable
transitiveintransitive
To cause (somebody) emotional pain.
Be the source of pain
transitiveintransitive
To damage, harm, impair, undermine, impede.
adjective
Feeling physical or emotional pain.
Wounded, physically injured.
noun
Psychological suffering
An emotional or psychological humiliation or bad experience.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: To cause (a person or animal) physical pain and/or injury.
Used this way, hurt is a reasonably familiar word with a clearly unfavourable pull. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Negative
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Moderate
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Serious and weighty
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use hurt
- “If anybody hurts my little brother, I will get upset.”verb
- “This latest gaffe hurts the legislator's reelection prospects still further.”verb
- “How to overcome old hurts of the past.”noun
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Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
A symptom of some physical hurt or disorder.
More about this wordSynonyms, forms, origin
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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.