Stress

/ˈstɹɛs/ · noun

Meaning

(biology) A physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism..

Definitions by Sense

1. (biology) A physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism.
2. (biology) Aggression toward an organism resulting in a response in an attempt to restore previous conditions.
3. (countable, physics) 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.
4. (countable, physics) Force externally applied to a body which cause internal stress within the body.
5. (uncountable) Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal.
6. (countable, phonetics, loosely) 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.
7. (countable, phonetics, 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.
8. (uncountable) Emphasis placed on a particular point in an argument or discussion (whether spoken or written).

Example Sentences

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). 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.

lexical stress

phrase stress, prosodic stress

Some people put the stress on the first syllable of “controversy”; others put it on the second.

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.

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

“Emphasis” is stressed on the first syllable, but “emphatic” is stressed on the second.

Synonyms for stress

Antonyms for stress

Related Words

Word Forms

• stresses
• stressing
• stressed

Usage Notes

Choose a synonym only when it preserves the intended meaning, tone, and grammar of the full sentence.

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