pain in the neck
pain in the neck noun: someone or something which is annoying, irritating or inconvenient.
Noun
pain in the neck (plural pains in the neck)
- Someone or something which is annoying, irritating or inconvenient.
- Got to know McTodd, found he wasn’t coming to the castle, and came down instead of him, same as me. Only he got there first, damn him! Wouldn’t that give you a pain in the neck!”1923, P. G. Wodehouse, Leave It to Psmith, London, page 188
- OK, call me a hypersensitive liberal, if you want. It wouldn’t be the first time. I can be a pain in the neck about racial, ethnic and religious bias sometimes, but I think it’s better to be hypersensitive than insensitive.2022 November 19, Clarence Page, “Sometimes offensive comedy is just lazy laughs”, in Chicago Tribune
- Synonyms:
- pain in the ass, pain in the butt, pest, nuisance
Synonyms of pain in the neck
Forms of pain in the neck
| plural | pains in the neck |
|---|
Origin of pain in the neck
First attested in the 1920s.
Questions about pain in the neck
- What does pain in the neck mean?
- Pain in the neck means someone or something which is annoying, irritating or inconvenient.
- What part of speech is pain in the neck?
- Pain in the neck is a noun.
- What is the plural of pain in the neck?
- The plural of pain in the neck is pains in the neck.
Words near pain in the neck in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: pain in the neck (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.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-pain in the neck.ogg.
Cite this entry: “pain in the neck.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pain_in_the_neck. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.