tortured
/ˈtɔɹt͡ʃɚd/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.78 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
simple past and past participle of torture
adj
Involving suffering and difficulty.
adj
Of literature, burdened by unnecessary complexity, obfuscation, abstruseness, etc.
Example Sentences
- "Those who have escaped the dark and terrible aspects of life will find my brutality, my flash of rage in our final tragedy, easy enough to blame; for they know what is wrong as well as any, but not what is possible to tortured men. But those who have been under the shadow, who have gone down at last to elemental things, will have a wider charity."
- "a tortured history"
- "tortured prose"
- "Language was often tortured to disguise the racial nature of hazardous experimentation."
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈtɔɹt͡ʃɚd/
- British English: /ˈtɔːt͡ʃəd/
Inflected Forms
more tortured (comparative)
most tortured (superlative)