Word.ws English Dictionary

pre-distressed

pre-distressed adjective: already distressed before purchase, artificially made to look worn and old.

Adjective

pre-distressed (not comparable)

  1. (colloquial) Already distressed before purchase, artificially made to look worn and old.
    • a new pre-distressed J.Crew cap2004 August 30, The New Yorker, page 38
    • People today love pre-distressed denim for the same reason earlier generations loved singing cowboys. They're beautiful fictions that allow us to live in the most comfortable parts of our past without enduring the pain that truly went along with it.2022, Carolyn Purnell, Blue Jeans, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 45

Forms of pre-distressed

alternative formpredistressed

Origin of pre-distressed

From pre- + distressed.

Questions about pre-distressed

What does pre-distressed mean?
Pre-distressed means already distressed before purchase, artificially made to look worn and old.
What part of speech is pre-distressed?
Pre-distressed is an adjective.

Words near pre-distressed in the dictionary

  1. pre-disease
  2. pre-diseases
  3. pre-distillation
  4. pre-distortion
  5. pre-distortions
  6. pre-distressed
  7. pre-drank
  8. pre-dreadnought
  9. pre-dreadnoughts
  10. pre-drink
  11. pre-drinking

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pre-distressed (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: “pre-distressed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pre-distressed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.