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TORMENTED
| Pronunciation (US): |  | (GB): | |
I. (adjective)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Experiencing intense pain especially mental pain
Example:
a tortured witness to another's humiliation
Synonyms:
anguished; tormented; tortured
Classified under:
Similar:
sorrowful (experiencing or marked by or expressing sorrow especially that associated with irreparable loss)
Sense 2
Meaning:
Tormented or harassed by nightmares or unreasonable fears
Example:
hagridden...by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth
Synonyms:
hag-ridden; hagridden; tormented
Classified under:
Similar:
troubled (characterized by or indicative of distress or affliction or danger or need)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Past simple / past participle of the verb torment
Context examples:
I hope this pleases you (turning her back on him); I hope your eyes are not tormented now.
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
At length, the steady ticking of the undisturbed clock on the wall tormented me to that degree that I resolved to go to bed.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
Tormented, incited to hate, he was kept a prisoner so that there was no way of satisfying that hate except at the times his master saw fit to put another dog against him.
(White Fang, by Jack London)
This idea pursued me and tormented me at every moment from which I might otherwise have snatched repose and peace.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
He awoke next morning from rosy scenes of dream to a steamy atmosphere that smelled of soapsuds and dirty clothes, and that was vibrant with the jar and jangle of tormented life.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
But historians are not accountable for the difficulty of learning to read; and even you yourself, who do not altogether seem particularly friendly to very severe, very intense application, may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worth-while to be tormented for two or three years of one's life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.
(Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen)
After two days and nights, I felt as if I had lived there for a year, and yet I was not an hour older, but was quite as much tormented by my own youthfulness as ever.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
Sometimes I entreated my attendants to assist me in the destruction of the fiend by whom I was tormented; and at others I felt the fingers of the monster already grasping my neck, and screamed aloud with agony and terror.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
She had never been tormented by womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy, dense even to the full significance of that delicate master's delicate allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens and knights.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
