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say it: TAWR-chur
torture is a noun and verb meaning "extreme mental distress". It carries 7 recorded senses.
intense feelings of suffering; acute mental or physical pain
“an agony of doubt”
“the torments of the damned”
the act of distorting something so it seems to mean something it was not intended to mean
the deliberate, systematic, or wanton infliction of physical or mental suffering by one or more persons in an attempt to force another person to yield information or to make a confession or for any other reason
“it required unnatural torturing to extract a confession”
torment emotionally or mentally
subject to torture
“The sinners will be tormented in Hell, according to the Bible”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for torture come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.