pain in the neck

Questions about pain in the neck

What does pain in the neck mean?

pain in the neck means "a bothersome annoying person". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for pain in the neck?

Close synonyms include pain, nuisance, annoyance, bother, botheration. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is pain in the neck a common word?

pain in the neck is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.