Word.ws English Dictionary

pain-racked

pain-racked adjective: racked with pain, in pain, suffering.

Adjective

pain-racked (comparative more pain-racked, superlative most pain-racked)

  1. Racked with pain, in pain, suffering.
    • ’Tis thine to ease the pain-racked breast, With doubts, with trembling fear o’erwhelm’d1786, “Poetry”, in Walker's Hibernian Magazine, Or, Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge, page 661
    • Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as the illusive wreaths of sleep brood upon a pain-racked mind, causing it to forget its sorrow.1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC

Forms of pain-racked

comparativemore pain-racked
superlativemost pain-racked
alternative formpain-wracked

Origin of pain-racked

Variant of “racked with pain”, in sense rack (“suffer pain, torture”); see usage notes for rack.

Questions about pain-racked

What does pain-racked mean?
Pain-racked means racked with pain, in pain, suffering.
What part of speech is pain-racked?
Pain-racked is an adjective.

Words near pain-racked in the dictionary

  1. pain scores
  2. pain threshold
  3. pain thresholds
  4. pain-free
  5. pain-making
  6. pain-racked
  7. pain-relieving
  8. painable
  9. painal
  10. painch
  11. painches

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pain-racked (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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