stress

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   the relative prominence of a syllable or musical note, especially with regard to stress or pitch

   I put the stress on the wrong syllable and was misunderstood.

2. 2
   noun

   (physics) force that produces strain on a physical body

   the intensity of stress is expressed in units of force divided by units of area

3. 3
   noun

   difficulty that causes worry or emotional tension

   They took some time to regroup and clear their minds of the stresses and strains of life.

4. 4
   noun

   special emphasis attached to something

   the stress was more on accuracy than on speed

5. 5
   noun

   Emotional pressure suffered by a human being or other animal.

   Go easy on him, he's been under a lot of stress lately.

6. 6
   noun

   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.

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

7. 7
   noun

   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.

   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.

8. 8
   noun

   Obsolete form of distress.

   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

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.