throe

English

Etymology

From (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Middle English throwe, perhaps from (deprecated template usage) [etyl] Old English þrēa, þrówian (“suffer”).

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -əʊ
• Homophone: throw

Noun

throe (plural throes)

1. A pang, spasm.
   • 1819, Percy Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy:

     As if their own indignant Earth

     Which gave the sons of England birth

     Had felt their blood upon her brow,

     And shuddering with a mother's throe

     Had turned every drop of blood

     By which her face had been bedewed

     To an accent unwithstood, —

     As if her heart had cried aloud: [...]

2. (usually in the plural) A hard struggle.
   • 2019 August 14, A. A. Dowd, “Good Boys puts a tween spin on the R-rated teen comedy, to mostly funny effect”, in The A.V. Club‎^[1]:

     Of the group, Max (Room’s Jacob Tremblay) is the most nominally mature, at least biologically speaking; unlike his childhood companions, he’s entered the early throes of puberty, and spends a lot of his waking hours pining, rather chastely, for a classmate (Millie Davis).

3. A tool for splitting wood into shingles; a frow.

Synonyms

• See also Thesaurus:agony
• See also Thesaurus:pain

Derived terms

• in the throes of

Translations

severe spasm of pain, especially near the moment of death

• Dutch: stuiptrekking (nl)
• Finnish: kouristus (fi)
• French: agonie (fr) f
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}
• German: Wehen (de) n, Agonie (de) f, Krampf (de) m
• Russian: предсме́ртная аго́ния f (predsmértnaja agónija), му́ки (ru) f pl (múki), спазм (ru) m (spazm)
• Spanish: agonía (es) f

Verb

throe (third-person singular simple present throes, present participle throeing, simple past and past participle throed)

1. (transitive) To put in agony.
   • 1610, The Tempest, by Shakespeare, act 2 scene 1

     SEBASTIAN:

     Prithee, say on:

     The setting of thine eye and cheek proclaim

     A matter from thee, and a birth, indeed

     Which throes thee much to yield.

2. (intransitive) To struggle in extreme pain; to be in agony; to agonize.

Translations

to put in agony

• Russian: вызыва́ть аго́нию impf (vyzyvátʹ agóniju), терза́ть (ru) impf (terzátʹ)
• (deprecated template usage) {{trans-mid}}

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “throe”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Anagrams

• Rothe, heort-, hetro, other, rothe, threo-