stress
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Pronunciation: ipa: /stɹɛs/
rhymes: -ɛs
Forms: form: stresses
Etymology: 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”).
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.
Senses: topics: biology
natural-sciences
glosses: A physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism.
topics: biology
natural-sciences
glosses: Aggression toward an organism resulting in a response in an attempt to restore previous conditions.
topics: natural-sciences
physical-sciences
physics
glosses: 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.
topics: natural-sciences
physical-sciences
physics
glosses: Force externally applied to a body which cause internal stress within the body.
examples: text: Go easy on him, he's been under a lot of stress lately.
text: 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). 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.
ref: 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 social support to mitigate depression”, in Current Psychology, →DOI:
glosses: Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal.
examples: text: Some people put the stress on the first syllable of “controversy”; others put it on the second.
topics: human-sciences
linguistics
phonetics
phonology
sciences
synonyms: accent
glosses: 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.
examples: text: 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 sound quite unpredictably different in all these families by the time of the crucial accent shift from pitch to stress. […] once a language becomes stress-sensitive, there seems to be a strong tendency in early Indo-European languages to shift the stress to the first syllable. This change happens shortly after the change to stress accent in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic, and Proto-Celtic, and even Thessalian, with evidence from Dybo's Law and Verner's Law left behind to show that sound changes happened after the changes to stress accent.
ref: 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 Historical Linguistics, San Antonio, Texas, 31 July – 4 August 2017, →DOI, page 59:
topics: human-sciences
linguistics
phonetics
phonology
sciences
synonyms: stress accent
antonyms: pitch
pitch accent
qualifier: strictly
glosses: 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.
glosses: Emphasis placed on a particular point in an argument or discussion (whether spoken or written).
examples: text: With this sad Hersal of his heavy stress,
The warlike Damzel was empassion's sore,
And said; Sir Knight, your Cause is nothing less
Than is your Sorrow , certes if not more
ref: 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
glosses: Obsolete form of distress.
qualifier: Scots law
glosses: distress; the act of distraining; also, the thing distrained.
Synonyms: topics: phonetics
phonology
linguistics
human-sciences
sciences
word: accent
topics: phonetics
phonology
linguistics
human-sciences
sciences
word: emphasis
sense: on words in speaking
word: emphasis
sense: on a point
word: emphasis
Derived terms: anti-stress
combat stress reaction
complex post-traumatic stress disorder
critical incident stress management
engineering stress
eu-stress
flow stress
genotoxic stress
internal stress
nitrosative stress
oxidative stress
Peierls stress
porcine stress syndrome
post traumatic stress disorder
posttraumatic stress disorder
post-traumatic stress disorder
post-traumatic stress syndrome
premenstrual stress
primary stress
residual stress
secondary stress
shear stress
storm and stress
stress ball
stress cardiomyopathy
stress deafness
stress eating
stress fracture
stress-free
stressfree
stressful
stress function
stress incontinence
stress mark
stress of weather
stress puppy
stress test
stress-timed
stress timing
stresswise
stress wood
true stress
yield stress