stress

/ˈstɹɛs//stɹɛs/

stress noun: a physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism. Also the obsolete form of distress.

Noun

stress (countable and uncountable, plural stresses)

A physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism.
Aggression toward an organism resulting in a response in an attempt to restore previous conditions.
(countable) The internal distribution of force across a small boundary per unit area of that boundary (pressure) within a body. It causes strain or deformation and is typically symbolised by σ or τ.
(countable) Force externally applied to a body which cause internal stress within the body.
(uncountable) Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal.
- Go easy on him, he's been under a lot of stress lately.
- Lazarus and Folkman’s transactional model of stress and coping describes psychological stress as “a particular relationship between the person and the environment that is appraised as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and endangering his or her well-being” (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984, p.19)....2024 December 16, Amanda M. Y. Chu, Damen H. Y. Woo, Agnes Tiwari, Helina Yuk, Mike K. P. So, “Which types of family caregivers are more prone to developing depression? Leveraging non-financial...
(broadly, countable) A suprasegmental feature of a language having additional attention raised to a sound, word or word group by means of of loudness, duration or pitch; phonological prominence.
- lexical stress
- phrase stress, prosodic stress
Synonyms:

emphasis, accent
(countable, strictly) The suprasegmental feature of a language having additional attention raised to a sound by means of loudness and/or duration; phonological prominence phonetically achieved by means of dynamics as distinct from pitch.
- The shift from pitch to stress appears to happen before the other obliques begin merging in the Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic, Primitive Irish, and Middle Indo-Aryan. But further investigation into the timeline of sound changes […] shows that, at least in Germanic, the oblique and core noun stems...2020 September 7, Steve Rapaport, “Parallel syncretism in early Indo-European”, in Bridget Drinka, editor, Historical Linguistics 2017: Selected Papers from the 23rd International Conference on...
Synonyms:

stress accent

Antonyms:

pitch, pitch accent
(uncountable) Emphasis placed on a particular point in an argument or discussion (whether spoken or written).

Synonyms:

emphasis
(Scots law) distress; the act of distraining; also, the thing distrained.

Verb

stress (third-person singular simple present stresses, present participle stressing, simple past and past participle stressed)

(transitive) To apply force to (a body or structure) causing strain.
(transitive) To apply emotional pressure to (a person or animal).
(informal, intransitive) To suffer stress; to worry or be agitated.
(transitive) To emphasise (a syllable of a word).
- “Emphasis” is stressed on the first syllable, but “emphatic” is stressed on the second.
(transitive) To emphasise (words in speaking).

Synonyms:

emphasise, emphasize
(transitive) To emphasise (a point) in an argument or discussion.
- I must stress that this information is given in strict confidence.
Synonyms:

emphasise, emphasize, underline

Also used as

stress is also the obsolete form of distress.

stress meaning in Hindi, Sinhala, Tagalog and Arabic

stress in Hindi

(physics) internal force across a boundary per area: खिंचाव khiñcāv, तान tān
emotional pressure: तनाव tanāv
on a point in an argument: बल bal
to apply force to, causing strain: बल bal

stress in Sinhala

(physics) internal force across a boundary per area: ආතතිය ātatiya
emotional pressure: ආතතිය ātatiya

stress in Tagalog

(physics) internal force across a boundary per area: sidhi
emotional pressure: istres

stress in Arabic

(physics) internal force across a boundary per area: إِجْهَاد ʔijhād
emotional pressure: إِجْهَاد ʔijhād

More languagesFewer languages

stress in Malay: tegasan, tekanan
stress in Indonesian: stres
stress in Thai: ความเครียด kwaam-krîiat
stress in Vietnamese: áp lực, nhấn mạnh, căng thẳng, xì-trét

Examples of stress in a sentence

Some people put the stress on the first syllable of “controversy”; others put it on the second.
According to these authors, the essence of inducing stress is how a person appraises the situation and whether he or she has the physical and mental ability to cope with the problem.2024 December 16, Amanda M. Y. Chu, Damen H. Y. Woo, Agnes Tiwari, Helina Yuk, Mike K. P. So, “Which types of family caregivers are more...
The shift from pitch to stress appears to happen before the other obliques begin merging in the Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic, Primitive Irish, and Middle Indo-Aryan.2020 September 7, Steve Rapaport, “Parallel syncretism in early Indo-European”, in Bridget Drinka, editor, Historical Linguistics 2017...

All 40 example sentences with stress

Synonyms of stress

Antonyms

All synonyms and antonyms of stress

Forms of stress

Noun
plural	stresses
Verb
third-person singular present	stresses
present participle	stressing
past participle	stressed
past	stressed

Past tense of stress: stressed

Plural of stress: stresses

Origin of stress

From a shortening of Middle English destresse, borrowed from Old French destrecier, from Latin distringō (“to stretch out”). This form probably coalesced with Middle English stresse, from Old French estrece (“narrowness”), from Vulgar Latin *strictia, from Latin strictus (“narrow”). Displaced native Old English swēġ (“accent, stress”), though strictly in the grammatical sense. In the sense of "mental strain" or “disruption”, used occasionally in the 1920s and 1930s by psychologists, including Walter Cannon (1934); in “biological threat”, used by endocrinologist Hans Selye, by metaphor with stress in physics (force on an object) in the 1930s, and popularized by same in the 1950s.

Words formed from stress

Words that rhyme with stress

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about stress

What does stress mean?: Stress means a physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism.
What is stress in Hindi?: Stress in Hindi is खिंचाव (khiñcāv), तान (tān), बल (bal). See Stress meaning in Hindi.
How do you use stress in a sentence?: Some people put the stress on the first syllable of “controversy”; others put it on the second.
What part of speech is stress?: Stress can be a noun or a verb.
How do you pronounce stress?: Stress is pronounced /ˈstɹɛs/ (UK).
What is the plural of stress?: The plural of stress is stresses.

Words near stress in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: stress (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Xavier hillier-stress.wav, en-us-stress.ogg.

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