Word.ws English Dictionary

after-pain

after-pain is the alternative spelling of afterpain.

Meaning of afterpain

Noun

afterpain (plural afterpains)

  1. Pain that occurs or remains after an event, such as surgery (especially dental surgery), eating spicy food, or simply an initial, sharper pain.
    • [Causes of] afterpain are rapid injection of the solution or using it too hot, and where the solution is taken from a stock bottle and not boiled; afterpain may also result from sepsis. The enigma of afterpain will undoubedly always by with us[…]1924, Northwest Journal of Dentistry, page 7
  2. (in plural, often) Pain of uterine contractions experienced after childbirth (especially after passage of the placenta).

Forms of after-pain

pluralafter-pains

Questions about after-pain

What is after-pain the alternative spelling of?
After-pain is the alternative spelling of afterpain.

Words near after-pain in the dictionary

  1. after-lives
  2. after-market
  3. after-markets
  4. after-morn
  5. after-morns
  6. after-pain
  7. after-pains
  8. after-parties
  9. after-party
  10. after-potential
  11. after-potentials

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: after-pain (page history and authors); afterpain (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “after-pain.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/after-pain. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.