ordeal
pronunciation
How to pronounce ordeal in British English:
UK [ɔːˈdiːl]
How to pronounce ordeal in American English:
US [ɔːrˈdiːl]
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- Noun:
- a severe or trying experience
- a primitive method of determining a person's guilt or innocence by subjecting the accused person to dangerous or painful tests believed to be under divine control; escape was usually taken as a sign of innocence
Word Origin
- ordeal
- ordeal: [OE] The ‘meting out of judgement’ is the etymological notion immediately underlying ordeal, but at a more primitive level still than that it denotes simply ‘distribution, giving out shares’. It comes ultimately from prehistoric Germanic *uzdailjan ‘share out’, a compound verb formed from *uz- ‘out’ and *dailjan, ancestor of English deal.The noun derived from this was *uzdailjam, and it came to be used over the centuries for the ‘handing out of judgements’ (modern German urteil, for instance, means among other things ‘judicial verdict or sentence’). Its Old English descendant, ordāl, denoted specifically a ‘trial in which a person’s guilt or innocence were determined by a hazardous physical test, such as holding on to red-hot iron’, but the metaphorical extension to any ‘trying experience’ did not take place until as recently as the mid-17th century.=> deal
- ordeal (n.)
- Old English ordel, ordal, "trial by physical test," literally "judgment, verdict," from Proto-Germanic noun *uz-dailjam (cognates: Old Saxon urdeli, Old Frisian urdel, Dutch oordeel, German urteil "judgment"), literally "that which is dealt out" (by the gods), from *uzdailijan "share out," related to Old English adælan "to deal out" (see deal (n.1)). Curiously absent in Middle English, and perhaps reborrowed 16c. from Medieval Latin or Middle French, which got it from Germanic. The notion is of the kind of arduous physical test (such as walking blindfolded and barefoot between red-hot plowshares) that was believed to determine a person's guilt or innocence by immediate judgment of the deity, an ancient Teutonic mode of trial. English retains a more exact sense of the word; its cognates in German, etc., have been generalized. Metaphoric extension to "anything which tests character or endurance" is attested from 1650s. The prefix or- survives in English only in this word, but was common in Old English and other Germanic languages (Gothic ur-, Old Norse or-, etc.) and originally was an adverb and preposition meaning "out."
Synonym
Example
- 1. It has since mutated into an annual ordeal for reputable universities .
- 2. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind .
- 3. How dispiriting that europe is still so ill-prepared for the ordeal to come .
- 4. Four young boys with a rare , fatal brain condition have made it through a dangerous ordeal .
- 5. We are a nation that has seen promise amid peril , and claimed opportunity from ordeal .