STRESS • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Stress

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/strɛs/ Listen

noun

Stress n.

1.

Distress. (Obs.) "Sad hersal of his heavy stress."

2.

Pressure, strain; used chiefly of immaterial things; except in mechanics; hence, urgency; importance; weight; significance. "The faculties of the mind are improved by exercise, yet they must not be put to a stress beyond their strength." "A body may as well lay too little as too much stress upon a dream."

3.

(Mech. & Physics) The force, or combination of forces, which produces a strain; force exerted in any direction or manner between contiguous bodies, or parts of bodies, and taking specific names according to its direction, or mode of action, as thrust or pressure, pull or tension, shear or tangential stress. "Stress is the mutual action between portions of matter."

4.

(Pron.) Force of utterance expended upon words or syllables. Stress is in English the chief element in accent and is one of the most important in emphasis.

5.

(Scots Law) Distress; the act of distraining; also, the thing distrained.

Stress of voice, unusual exertion of the voice.

Stress of weather, constraint imposed by continued bad weather; as, to be driven back to port by stress of weather.

To lay stress upon, to attach great importance to; to emphasize. "Consider how great a stress is laid upon this duty."

To put stress upon, or To put to a stress, to strain.

verb

Stress v. t.

1.

To press; to urge; to distress; to put to difficulties. (R.)

2.

To subject to stress, pressure, or strain.

3.

To subject to phonetic stress; to accent.

4.

To place emphasis on; to make emphatic; emphasize.

See images of 'Stress'

Etymology of 'Stress'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Stress" Quotes from Famous Books

... should not live, because to fat and eat them somehow appears uncongenial. "Kill Dogs and Feed Pigs," they write to the papers, and, with a Velasquez available, would burn it rather than go chilly. "Kill dogs, feed pigs, and let me eat the pigs!" they cry, even under no great stress, these stern economists who have not noticed how wasteful the Creator is proved to be if He made themselves. They take the strictly intestinal view of life. It is not intelligent; parasite bacilli will get them ...

— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... uppermost, resurrection life, radiant and joyful and strong, for we represent down here Him who liveth and was dead and is alive for evermore. Stress had to be laid in these pages on the death gateway, but a gateway is never a dwelling-place; the death-stage is never meant for our souls to stay and brood over, but to pass through with a will into the light beyond. We may and must, ...

— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter

... a sudden gust or stress of weather a ship is thrown so far over that the ballast settles to leeward, and prevents the ship ...

— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... accomplished by an increased stress of voice laid upon the word or phrase. Sometimes, though more rarely, the same object is effected by an unusual lowering of the voice, even to a whisper, and not unfrequently by a pause before the ...

— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... germs of larger state-confederacies in the political fraternizing or even amalgamation of several previously independent stocks (symmachy, synoikismos) are in like manner common to both nations. The more stress is to be laid on this fact of the common foundations of Hellenic and Italian polity, that it is not found to extend to the other Indo-Germanic stocks; the organization of the Germanic community, for example, ...

— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org