distraught
- 01 C2 Proficiency
an old-fashioned way to describe someone who has lost their mind or is acting crazy.
mentally deranged or insane; this sense is largely obsolete in modern clinical contexts but survives in historical literature.
Simple“In the old story, the king became distraught after losing his kingdom.”
In context“The protagonist's descent into a distraught state of mind serves as a central theme in the nineteenth-century gothic novel.”
UsageIn modern English, this sense has been replaced by 'distressed' or 'upset' for emotion, and clinical terms for mental health.
“It starts with children and their mothers—including a younger, more innocent Sarah Connor—on a playground, oblivious to the danger, as a distraught Sarah soundlessly tries to warn them by banging on the chain-link fence.”
“No less distraught, her husband threatened to kill himself.”
From Middle English distraught, blend of distract (“distracted”) and straught (“stretched, distraught”), past participle of strecchen (“to stretch”). Compare also bestraught, extraught, forstraught, etc. More at distract, stretch.
Etymology adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.