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TORTURED
| 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)
II. (verb)
Sense 1
Past simple / past participle of the verb torture
Context examples:
This tortured moon is embroiled in a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter and other Jovian satellites, causing intense tidal heating within its interior.
(Massive Lava Waves Detected on Solar System’s Most Volcanically Active Object, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)
Her apprehensions once raised, paid by their excess for all her former security; and the servant who sat up with her, for she would not allow Mrs. Jennings to be called, only tortured her more, by hints of what her mistress had always thought.
(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)
I ought probably to have done or said nothing; but I was so tortured by a sense of remorse at thus hurting his feelings, I could not control the wish to drop balm where I had wounded.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
Sordid and selfish as I knew it was, and as I tortured myself by knowing that it was, to let my mind run on my own distress so much, I was so devoted to Dora that I could not help it.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.
(The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson)
There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock.
(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this execrable crew of butchers, employed in so pious an expedition, is a modern colony, sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people!
(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)
Persecuted and tortured as I am and have been, can death be any evil to me?
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
His forearms were black and blue from wrist to elbow, what of the countless blows he had warded off, and here and there the tortured flesh was beginning to fester.
(Martin Eden, by Jack London)
All the woes of tortured life, all its stupendous indictment of high heaven, its innumerable sorrows, seemed to be centered and condensed into that one dreadful, agonized cry.
(The Lost World, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
