Speakur

Word Pronunciation & Dictionary

thousand-yard stare

Word Rarity Rare

Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.76 in modern English

Syllables
thou-sand--yard stare
IPA
25
Scrabble Score
17
Letters
4
Syllables
11
Unique Chars

Meaning

noun

A blank, unfocused glance given by a traumatized person, especially a soldier who has seen combat.

Informal

Etymology

Such terms are usually said to have originated in the usage of soldiers and the physicians who treated them for combat wounds and combat stress. A search of a large corpus finds thousand-yard stare attested during World War II (citations from 1943 to 1945), naming a symptom of social isolation in far-flung posts or of combat stress; the absence of attestations of *-yard stare and *-year stare from before 1943 suggests that perhaps this symptom (from any mentally traumatic cause) was not called by these names until the 1940s. In contrast, the thematically related term shell shock was in use during World War I.

Usage

Inflected Forms

thousand-yard stares (plural) thousand yard stare (alternative)

Phrases

dead-eyed post-traumatic stress disorder the elephant shell shock

Frequently Paired Words

dead-eyed post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD the elephant shell shock

Synonyms

thousand-mile stare hundred-yard stare

Questions

What does thousand-yard stare mean?
A blank, unfocused glance given by a traumatized person, especially a soldier who has seen combat.
Where does thousand-yard stare come from?
Such terms are usually said to have originated in the usage of soldiers and the physicians who treated them for combat wounds and combat stress. A search of a large corpus finds thousand-yard stare attested during World War II (citations from 1943 to 1945), naming a symptom of social isolation in far-flung posts or of combat stress; the absence of attestations of *-yard stare and *-year stare from before 1943 suggests that perhaps this symptom (from any mentally traumatic cause) was not called by these names until the 1940s. In contrast, the thematically related term shell shock was in use during World War I.

How to pronounce thousand-yard stare

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