Word.ws English Dictionary

sore

UK/sɔː//soɹ/

sore adjective: causing pain or discomfort; painfully sensitive.

sore: causing pain or discomfort; painfully sensitive
Image: Crohnie, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

sore (comparative sorer, superlative sorest)

  1. Causing pain or discomfort; painfully sensitive.
    • Her feet were sore from walking so far.
  2. Sensitive; tender; easily pained, grieved, or vexed; very susceptible of irritation.
    • Malice and hatred are very fretting and vexatious, and apt to make our minds sore and uneasy.1671, John Tillotson, “Sermon IV. The Advantages of Religion to Particular Persons. Psalm XIX. 11.”, in The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury: […]...
  3. Dire; distressing.
    • The school was in sore need of textbooks, theirs having been ruined in the flood.
  4. (informal) Feeling animosity towards someone; annoyed or angered.
    • Joe was sore at Bob for beating him at checkers.
    • “God damn it.” He was sore as hell. He was really furious.1951 July 16, J[erome] D[avid] Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 53
  5. (obsolete) Criminal; wrong; evil.
    • […]and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.c. 1599–1602 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac...

Adverb

sore (not comparable)

  1. (archaic) Very, excessively, extremely (of something bad).
    • And they answered Ioshua, and said, Because it was certainely told thy seruants, how that the Lord thy God commanded his seruant Moses to giue you all the land, and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land from before you, therefore we were sore afraid of our liues because of you, and haue done...1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Joshua 9:24
    • But on that day when Lancelot fled the lists, / His party, knights of utmost North and West, / Lords of waste marches, kings of desolate isles, / Came round their great Pendragon, saying to him / 'Lo, Sire, our knight thro' whom we won the day / Hath gone sore wounded, and hath left his prize /...1859, Alfred Tennyson, “Elaine”, in Idylls of the King, London: Edward Moxon & Co., […], →OCLC, pages 174–175
  2. Sorely.
    • But he was paying the penalty laid on
      His father's crime; for one time, cutting trees
      Alone among the hills, he spurned the prayer
      Of the Hamadryas Nymph, who, weeping sore,
      With earnest words besought him not to cut
      The trunk of an oak tree, which, with herself
      Coeval, had endured for many a year.1850, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, London: H.G. Bohn, page 229
    • And indeed I blamed myself and sore repented me of having taken compassion on him and continued in this condition, suffering fatigue not to be described, […]1885, Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night

Noun (1)

sore (plural sores)

  1. An injured, infected, inflamed or diseased patch of skin.
    • They put ointment and a bandage on the sore.
  2. Grief; affliction; trouble; difficulty.
    • I see plainly where his sore lies.1822, [Walter Scott], Peveril of the Peak. […], volume (please specify |volume=I to IV), Edinburgh: […] Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co., →OCLC

Verb

sore (third-person singular simple present sores, present participle soring, simple past and past participle sored)

  1. (transitive) To mutilate the legs or feet of (a horse) in order to induce a particular gait.
  2. (intransitive) To grow sores; to be beset with skin lesions.

Noun (2)

sore (plural sores)

  1. A young hawk or falcon in its first year.
    • Of the soare faulcon so I learn to fly1596, Edmund Spenser, An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie
  2. A young buck in its fourth year.
    • Some say a Sore, but not a sore, till now made sore with shooting.
    • The Dogges did yell, put ell to Sore, then Sorell iumps from thicket:
    • Or Pricket-sore, or else Sorell, the people fall a hooting.
    • If Sore be sore, then ell to Sore, makes fiftie sores O sorell:
    • Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more L.c. 1595–1596 (date written), William Shakespeare, “Loues Labour’s Lost”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...

Noun (3) capitalized: SORE

SORE (plural SOREs)

  1. (abbreviation, acronym) Acronym of small off-road engine.
    • Rather than banning these engines overnight, the state is rolling out the change gradually. The new rules tighten emissions standards over time, leading up to a ban on the sale of new gas-powered SOREs by 2028.2025 May 4, Stacey Sloughfy, “How California's Upcoming State Ban Will Impact RVs And Camping Trips”, in The Travel, archived from the original on 08 May 2025

sore meaning in Hindi, Bengali, Arabic and Malay

sore in Hindi

causing pain
सूजन sūjan
sensitive; tender
सूजन sūjan
injured, infected, inflamed, or diseased patch of skin
फोड़ा phoṛā, फुड़िया phuṛiyā

sore in Bengali

injured, infected, inflamed, or diseased patch of skin
জখম zôkhôm

sore in Arabic

causing pain
مُوجِع mūjiʕ, مُؤْلِم muʔlim
injured, infected, inflamed, or diseased patch of skin
سَعْفَة saʕfa

sore in Malay

causing pain
lenguh-lenguh
More languagesFewer languages
sore in Persian
دَردناک dardnâk
sore in Thai
เจ็บ jèp, แผล plɛ̌ɛ, แผลเปื่อย plɛ̌ɛ-bpʉ̀ai
sore in Vietnamese
đau đớn, sưng

Examples of sore in a sentence

  • TfN is clearly very sore about last year's axing of part of HS2.2024 May 1, “Network News: Do TfN and the DfT actually respect each other?”, in RAIL, number 1008, page 13:
  • Orion hit a rabbit once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out.1879, R[ichard] J[efferies], “The Old Punt: A Curious ‘Turnpike’”, in The Amateur Poacher, London: Smith, Elder, & Co., […], →OCLC, pages...
  • [… they] were often sore pressed to follow the trail at all, and at best were so delayed that in the afternoon of the second day, they still had not overhauled the fugitive.1919, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jungle Tales of Tarzan:
  • ‘I vow to crack him full sore,’ said the knight, taking out his writing-table and making a note.1936, Norman Lindsay, The Flyaway Highway, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, page 54:

All 40 example sentences with sore

Synonyms of sore

30 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of sore

Forms of sore

Adjective
comparativesorer
superlativesorest
Noun
pluralsores
pluralSOREs
Verb
third-person singular presentsores
present participlesoring
past participlesored
pastsored

Plural of sore: sores

Origin of sore

From Middle English sor, from Old English sār (“ache, wound”, noun) and sār (“painful, grievous”, adjective), from Proto-West Germanic *sair, from Proto-Germanic *sairaz (adjective) from Proto-Indo-European *seh₂iro-, enlargement of *seh₂y- (“to be fierce, afflict”). See also Dutch zeer (“sore, ache”), Danish sår (“wound”), German sehr (“very”); also Hittite [script needed] (sāwar, “anger”), Welsh hoed (“pain”), Ancient Greek αἱμωδία (haimōdía, “sensation of having teeth on edge”).

From Middle English sor (“sorrel”), from Old French sor (“sorrel; reddish”). Compare French saur (“(archaic) reddish-brown; describing a young bird of prey”).

Words formed from sore

Phrases with sore

4 more phrasesFewer phrases

Words that rhyme with sore

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about sore

What does sore mean?
Sore means causing pain or discomfort; painfully sensitive.
What is sore in Hindi?
Sore in Hindi is सूजन (sūjan), फोड़ा (phoṛā), फुड़िया (phuṛiyā). See Sore meaning in Hindi.
How do you use sore in a sentence?
TfN is clearly very sore about last year's axing of part of HS2.
What part of speech is sore?
Sore can be an adjective, an adverb, a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce sore?
Sore is pronounced /sɔː/ (UK).

Words near sore in the dictionary

  1. sordono
  2. sordor
  3. sordors
  4. sords
  5. sordune
  6. sore
  7. sore boob means more boob
  8. sore eyes
  9. sore loser
  10. Sore Loserman
  11. sore losers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sore (page history and authors); SORE (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-us-sore.ogg.

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