painful.
Causing pain or distress, either physical or mental.
Meaning & usage
Causing pain or distress, either physical or mental.
Afflicted or suffering with pain (of a body part or, formerly, of a person).
Requiring effort or labor; difficult, laborious.
Painstaking; careful; industrious.
Very bad, poor.
His violin playing is painful.
Where this word comes from
From Middle English paynful, peinful, peynful, paynefull, peynefull, equivalent to pain + -ful. Compare Danish pinefuld (“painful”).
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.