Word.ws English Dictionary

worried well

worried well noun: users of medical or psychiatric services who are not suffering from any diagnosable disease.

Noun

worried well pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) Users of medical or psychiatric services who are not suffering from any diagnosable disease.
    • "In cities with a high and more visible number of men becoming sick and dying from AIDS, the worried well report panic attacks, somatic preoccupations, and difficulty functioning on the job because of obsessional worrying about the syndrome."1987, Kathy J. Harowski, “The Worried Well: Maximizing Coping in the Face of AIDS”, in Psychotherapy With Homosexual Men and Women, →ISBN, page 302

Origin of worried well

Coined in 1970 by Sidney Garfield, founder of Kaiser Permanente.

Questions about worried well

What does worried well mean?
Worried well means users of medical or psychiatric services who are not suffering from any diagnosable disease.
What part of speech is worried well?
Worried well is a noun.

Words near worried well in the dictionary

  1. worried
  2. worried along
  3. worried back
  4. worried down
  5. worried someone sick
  6. worried well
  7. worriedly
  8. worriedness
  9. worrier
  10. worriers
  11. worries

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: worried well (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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