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wound

nounverbverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈwuːnd//
  • United Kingdom//ˈwʉwnd//
  • United Kingdom//wawnd//
  • United States//ˈwund//
  • United States//ˈwaʊ̯nd//
  • United States/[ˈwaʊ̯nd]/

An injury, such as a cut, stab, or tear, to a (usually external) part of the body.

noun

  1. 1

    An injury, such as a cut, stab, or tear, to a (usually external) part of the body.

    The visitors were without Wayne Rooney after he suffered a head wound in training, which also keeps him out of England's World Cup qualifiers against Moldova and Ukraine.

    Showers of blood / Rained from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen.

    I went below, and did what I could for my wound; it pained me a good deal, and still bled freely; but it was neither deep nor dangerous, nor did it greatly gall me when I used my arm.

  2. 2

    figurativeA hurt to a person's feelings, reputation, prospects, etc.

    It took a long time to get over the wound of that insult.

  3. 3

    An injury to a person by which the skin is divided or its continuity broken.

Etymology

Noun from Middle English wund, from Old English wund, from Proto-West Germanic *wundu, from Proto-Germanic *wundō (“wound”), from Proto-Indo-European *wen- (“to strive, toil, win”). Cognates Cognate with Saterland Frisian Wuunde (“wound”), Cimbrian bunta (“wound”), Dutch wond, wonde (“wound”), German Wunde (“wonde”), Luxembourgish Wonn (“wound”), Yiddish וווּנד (vund, “wound”), Icelandic und (“wound”), Gothic *𐍅𐌿𐌽𐌳𐌰 (*wunda, “wound”) (whence 𐍅𐌿𐌽𐌳𐌿𐍆𐌽𐌹 (wundufni, “disease, plague”)); also Old Armenian վանդեմ (vandem, “to destroy; to catch a disease”). Verb from Middle English wunden, from Old English wundian, from Proto-Germanic *wundōną (“to wound”). Cognates Cognate with Cimbrian buntan (“to wound”), Dutch wonden (“to wound”), Gothic 𐌲𐌰𐍅𐌿𐌽𐌳𐍉𐌽 (gawundōn, “to wound”).

verb

  1. 1

    To hurt or injure (someone) by cutting, piercing, or tearing the skin.

    The police officer wounded the suspect during the fight that ensued.

  2. 2

    To hurt (a person's feelings).

    The actor's pride was wounded when the leading role went to his rival.

    I find neglect or rejection from my own community much harder to take and more wounding than the same thing or worse from the outside world.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of windsimple past and past participle of wind

    “[…] Captain Markam had been found lying half-insensible, gagged and bound, on the floor of the sitting-room, his hands and feet tightly pinioned, and a woollen comforter wound closely round his mouth and neck ; whilst Mrs. Markham's jewel-case, containing valuable jewellery and the secret plans of Port Arthur, had disappeared.[…]”

Etymology

See wind (Etymology 2)

Forms

plural
wounds
past tense
wounded
past participle
wounded
present participle
wounding
third person singular
wounds
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).