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trauma

noun

Simple meaning

An emotional wound or shock often having long-lasting effects.

Pronunciation

Say it like this:

trawmuh

Say the bold part a little louder.

US device voice
IPA pronunciation (US)

ˈtɹɔmə

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.

Word Review

Definition

Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.

noun

  1. An emotional wound or shock often having long-lasting effects

  2. An emotional wound leading to psychological injury.

  3. Any physical damage to the body caused by violence or accident or fracture etc.

  4. Any serious injury to the body, often resulting from violence or an accident.

  5. An event that causes great distress.

Word at a Glance

Difficulty
B1 · Intermediate (estimated)
Frequency
Moderately Common
Typical Use
General and technical use

Word Aura™

How this word commonly comes across.

Aura for this meaning

This meaning: An emotional wound or shock often having long-lasting effects

Used this way, trauma is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.

Emotional tone
Neutral
Formality
Neutral
Intensity
Not strongly marked
How common
Moderately common
Connotation
Matter-of-fact
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 trauma

  • “Witnessing the accident caused him significant emotional trauma.”

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Common Patterns and Combinations

How this word naturally appears with others.

Emotional

psychological traumaemotional trauma

Physical / serious

head trauma

Other combinations

birth traumatrauma centerfollowing traumachildhood traumaabdominal trauma

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Word Family

Related forms, grouped by how they connect.

Compound terms

Established multiword terms.

  • psychic traumanounCompound term

    An emotional wound or shock often having long-lasting effects.

  • birth traumanounCompound term

    Physical injury to an infant during the birth process.

  • blast traumanounCompound term

    Injury caused the explosion of a bomb (especially in enclosed spaces).

  • blunt traumanounCompound term

    Injury incurred when the human body hits or is hit by a large outside object (as a car).

  • penetrating traumanounCompound term

    Injury incurred when an object (as a knife or bullet or shrapnel) penetrates into the body.

Related words

Connected by subject or meaning, not by word formation.

  • posttraumatic amnesianounRelated term

    Loss of memory for events immediately following a trauma.

  • posttraumatic stress disordernounRelated term

    An anxiety disorder associated with serious traumatic events and characterized by such symptoms as survivor guilt, reliving the trauma in dreams, numbness and lack of involvement with…

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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.