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Meaning of agony in English:

agony

Pronunciation /ˈaɡəni/

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nounagonies

mass noun

  • 1Extreme physical or mental suffering.

    ‘he crashed to the ground in agony’
    • ‘What sort of world is this that predisposes roughly 20 percent of human beings to suffer mental agonies?’
    • ‘Grams argues that all social layers share in life's abundance of physical and mental agonies.’
    • ‘Very many others suffered those same physical agonies.’
    • ‘Dapper of dress and genial of manner, Corbett seems the antithesis of the tortured comic suffering endless agonies for his art.’
    • ‘The hospital is filthy, without drugs, and women who used to be nurses sit in the corner doing embroidery while patients suffer agonies without pain relief.’
    • ‘You can suffer agonies of rejection when you sign off with ‘Love’, only to receive ‘Best wishes’ in return.’
    • ‘Mr Handley, like so many of his fellow farmers up and down the land, must have been suffering agonies of worry as the weeks grind on and foot and mouth continues to ravage the land.’
    • ‘You tend to imagine the worst, suffer agonies of mind today.’
    • ‘It cannot be right that we should force people to suffer endless, needless agonies, knowing they will not get better.’
    • ‘At least the physical agonies that students undergo will be restricted or minimised.’
    • ‘One reason is that we are probably wrong to imagine that they have been suffering agonies of guilt all these years.’
    • ‘We start out thinking of these afflictions as separate agonies.’
    • ‘And therein lies a clue that perhaps this superman can in fact be tripped up by an opponent who fights through the pain to inflict agonies of his own.’
    • ‘One notion that haunts this Danish film is how in the blink of an eye a personal heaven can turn into a hell whose agonies reverberate traumatically through other lives.’
    • ‘As families are forced to empty out the contents of their cluttered home onto the back lawn, we'll see the trauma and agonies as they decide what stays and what goes.’
    • ‘You won't find many personal accounts of the agonies of backache or ingrowing toenails.’
    • ‘Authors and publishers hurt by lost revenue, agonies of tribulation’
    • ‘For years, he has suffered the nightmares and the agonies that, by all rights, should be ours too.’
    • ‘The problem was the poor woman then had to cope with a set of false teeth for the rest of her life with all the attendant agonies of wondering whether you can bite into an apple without leaving your teeth embedded into it.’
    • ‘And next month the agonies begin all over again.’
    pain, hurt, suffering, torture, torment, anguish, affliction, trauma
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    1. 1.1The final stages of a difficult or painful death.
      ‘his last agony’
      • ‘Only by concerted action can we counter the sheer humanity of those who wish to prolong the agony of death.’
      • ‘We want to ensure they have a dignified death and do not die in agony.’
      • ‘One can hardly feel the intensity of the agony that he is supposed to have endured in his final hours on earth.’
      • ‘Diaries kept by two of them recorded the indescribable agonies they had suffered as their lives ebbed slowly away.’
      • ‘As Jesus approached death he suffered agonies of mind and spirit that plunged him into uncharted depths.’

Origin

Late Middle English (originally denoting mental anguish alone): via Old French and late Latin from Greek agōnia, from agōn ‘contest’. The sense of physical suffering dates from the early 17th century.