beside oneself

beside oneself prepositional phrase: overcome; consumed by an emotion.

Prepositional phrase

(idiomatic) Overcome; consumed by an emotion.
- His widow was beside herself with grief.
- [...] he contemplated it most calmly. Comparatively, all other men, North and South, were beside themselves.1860, Henry David Thoreau, The Last Days of John Brown

beside oneself meaning in Bengali and Malayalam

beside oneself in Malayalam

desperate, distraught, overcome: ദുഃഖംകൊണ്ടു തന്നത്താൻമറന്ന അവസ്ഥയിലായ, നിയന്ത്രണം വിട്ട മാനസികാവസ്ഥയിലായ, ദുഃഖത്താൽ ആകെത്തകർന്ന, മനോവ്യഥയുള്ള, സംക്ഷുബ്ധനായ, വ്യഗ്രമനസ്കനായ

Forms of beside oneself

alternative Early Modern	besides oneself

Origin of beside oneself

Possibly derived from Ancient Greek παράνοια (paránoia, “madness”), from παράνοος (paránoos, “demented”), from παρά (pará, “beyond, beside”) + νόος (nóos, “mind, spirit”), with "beside mind" evolving into "beside oneself".

Questions about beside oneself

What does beside oneself mean?: Beside oneself means overcome; consumed by an emotion.
What is beside oneself in Bengali?: Beside oneself in Bengali is অভিভূত, কোনো আবেগ দ্বারা আচ্ছন্ন. See Beside oneself meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is beside oneself?: Beside oneself is a prepositional phrase.

Words near beside oneself in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: beside oneself (page history and authors); beside oneself (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); beside oneself (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-beside oneself.ogg.

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