Soreness

noun

noun ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The property, state, or condition of being sore; painfulness. uncountable, usually

    "The salve made the soreness go away, but with the aches gone I suddenly noticed my other pains."

  2. 2
    an uncomfortable feeling of mental painfulness or distress wordnet
  3. 3
    a pain that is felt (as when the area is touched) wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
tendernessa transient madnessacerbityacheacidacidity

Example

More examples

"The soreness in her throat made swallowing extremely painful."

Etymology

From Middle English sornes, sornesse, sarnesse, from Old English sārnes (“bodily pain; mental pain, affliction, grief”), from Proto-West Germanic *sairanassī, equivalent to sore + -ness. Cognate with Scots sairness (“soreness”), Old Frisian sērnisse, sērnesse (“injury, lesion”), Middle Low German sêrnisse, sêrenisse (“wounding, injury, distress, need”).

Related phrases

delayed-onset muscle soreness

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.