stress
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
6 characters
Language
English
word origin
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "stress", 6-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "stress" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "stress" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
stress is aEnglishnoun. It means: A physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism. Pronounced /stɹɛs/. It ranks #1,923 in English word frequency. Often confused with strips and strewn.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | stress |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /stɹɛs/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Frequency rank | #1,923 |
| Misspellings tracked | 8 |
| Confusable pairs | 18 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for stress is 6 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /stɹɛs/. Corpus data places it at rank #1,923 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.Wiktionary records 10 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 8 documented wrong-spelling variants for stress, with forms such as "srtess", "sstress", and "sterss". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It also participates in 18 confusable-pair relationships, "strips", "strewn", "stressed", and more, where similar look or sound leads writers to substitute one word for another in context.
Etymologically, the entry records: 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 … Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is stress, spelled S-T-R-E-S-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1A physical, chemical, infective agent aggressing an organism.
- 2Aggression toward an organism resulting in a response in an attempt to restore previous conditions.
- 3The 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.
- 4Force externally applied to a body which cause internal stress within the body.
- 5Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal.
- 6A 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.
- 7The 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.
- 8Emphasis placed on a particular point in an argument or discussion (whether spoken or written).
- 9Obsolete form of distress.
- 10distress; the act of distraining; also, the thing distrained.
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.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: srtess,sstress,sterss,stres,strress,strses,sttress,tsress
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for stress
Misspelling Variants of "stress"
Frequency rank: #1,923 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter S in our English index: