harrowing

Pluralharrowings

1. 1
   adjectiveformal

   Causing pain or distress; tormenting in a relentless, harassing way.

   Survivors gave harrowing accounts of the night the dam broke.

   The documentary follows one family's harrowing escape across three borders.

   Similardistressing, traumatic, agonizing, terrifying, disturbing

   Note

   Behind it stands the farm harrow, a heavy frame of teeth dragged across plowed ground to tear the clods apart; an ordeal that harrows a person rakes through them the same way. It usually describes an experience or the telling of one (a harrowing escape, harrowing accounts) and compares with more and most. Brian Hayes, in American Scientist in 2013, stretches it over a whole wartime youth.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of harrow.

   Two tractors were harrowing the plowed ground to smooth it for seeding.

   The crew spent the afternoon harrowing the south field after the rain.

   Note

   After be it is the verb at work (two tractors were harrowing the ground), and as a gerund it still takes a direct object: harrowing the lower field took a week. Put the in front and of after it, and the same spelling becomes the noun for the farm work, which can be counted, as in a field that received two harrowings.

3. 3
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The process of breaking up soil with a harrow, a toothed frame dragged across plowed land.

   A second harrowing broke up the clods the plow had left behind.

   Spring harrowing begins as soon as the ground is dry enough to work.

4. 4
   noun

   In Christianity, Christ's forcible invasion of Hell between his crucifixion and resurrection, in which he freed the souls of the righteous held captive by Satan.

   Medieval mystery plays staged the harrowing of hell as a loud, triumphant spectacle.

   In the icon, the harrowing is shown with Adam and Eve being pulled from their tombs.

   Note

   This sense lives in one fixed phrase, the harrowing of hell, shortened to the harrowing once the subject is clear. Medieval tellings make it loud and physical: in Jeffrey Burton Russell's Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages, Christ sweeps down on death and the Devil, smashes the doors of hell and carries the just off to heaven. The motif was highly influential in the Christian world of Britain and Ireland.

5. 5
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Suffering or torment, of the mind or the body.

   The memoir records the harrowings of her years in the refugee camp with quiet restraint.

   Nothing in his training had prepared him for the harrowing of those first weeks at the front.

   Similartorment, suffering, agony, anguish, ordeal

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The deliberate ravaging and plundering of a land by a hostile force, causing widespread destruction.

   The harrowing of the border counties left farms burned and granaries empty for a generation.

   Monks recorded each harrowing of the coast by raiders who returned every summer.

   Similarravaging, plundering, devastation

   Note

   The noun usually takes of and the land that suffered: the harrowing of the border counties, of a coast, of the north. Writing in 1956, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists pointed to the desolation in England that followed William the Conqueror's harrowing of the north. The same picture of a raid deep into enemy ground lies behind Christ's harrowing of hell.

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