suffering

Pluralsufferings

1. 1
   nouncountable or uncountable

   Pain or distress that someone endures, or the state of having to endure it.

   The famine brought widespread suffering to the region.

   Hospice care aims to reduce suffering in a patient's final days.

   Similarpain, distress, misery, hardship, anguish

   Oppositecomfort, relief, happiness

   Note

   Usually a mass noun, as in widespread suffering or great suffering. It also counts, though: the plural sufferings names particular hardships one by one and often sits in a list beside misfortunes and disasters. In law it turns up in fixed wording, where someone may be charged with causing unnecessary suffering to an animal. Use the singular for the general state and the plural when the griefs are being counted up.

2. 2
   adjective

   Experiencing pain; characterized by suffering.

   Aid workers brought food and medicine to the suffering villagers.

   She felt deep sympathy for the suffering animals in the shelter.

   Similarhurt, aching, pained, sore, tormented

   Note

   The adjective is gradable, and that sets it apart from the verb form: a person can be very suffering, or too suffering to move. Ruth Bryan writes of a body "too suffering to go on" in 1862. It can also describe an experience rather than a sufferer, so a night, or the sound of someone in pain, can be "very suffering." Before a noun, as in suffering villagers, it sits close to aching or in pain.

   I was too ill and too suffering to rise up to see the whole surface of it.

   Just to hear them was very suffering.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of suffer.

   Many families are suffering during the prolonged drought.

   He kept suffering in silence rather than asking anyone for help.

   Note

   The -ing form carries every meaning of suffer. Used without an object, it means feeling pain, undergoing hardship, or getting worse. With an object it means enduring, as in suffering losses, or, in archaic use, allowing, as in suffering them to pass. As a gerund it keeps the verb's power to take an object, which the noun for pain or distress cannot do.

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