🔊 Emphasis in speech 😰 Causing stress

stressfulness

4.2

How strongly a syllable or word is said in speech

noun
/ˈstrɛsfəlnəs/

Specialized

: estrés

Teachers often discuss the stressfulness of certain words to help students with pronunciation.

Examples

In poetry, the stressfulness of syllables can affect the rhythm of a line.
The stressfulness of the first syllable changes the word's meaning.
The stressfulness of the presentation made her nervous.
I didn't expect the stressfulness of the exam to affect me so much.
The stressfulness of certain syllables can change the meaning of words in English.
During the workshop, we explored the stressfulness of different words to improve our speaking skills.
In her speech, the stressfulness placed on key terms helped highlight her main points.

How Emphatic

overemphasis

1 6.1

accentuation

1 6.1

stressfulness

Specialized

4.2

emphasis

296 3.1

subtlety

54 6.8

Surface Forms

stressfulness singular

stressfulnesses plural

Morphology

stressfulness = stressful (transparent) = stress + ful + ness

Formed by adding -ness to the adjective 'stressful', so the meaning (a quality/state related to stress or emphasis) is directly derived.

Etymology

Stressfulness comes from the word stress, which means 'emphasis' or 'pressure', plus the parts -ful ('full of') and -ness ('state of'). In speech, imagine 'pressing' a syllable to make it louder or longer; that's why stressfulness means the degree of emphasis in a word.