careworn
Pronunciation
  • (RP) IPA: /ˈkɛːwɔːn/
  • (GA) IPA: /ˈkɛəɹˌwɔɹn/
Adjective

careworn

  1. Worn down by cares: show#Verb|showing the sign#Noun|signs of long-term stress#Noun|stress, tired#Adjective|tired and haggard due to prolonged#Adjective|prolonged worry#Noun|worry.
    The weeks of working hard to look after his sick family left him looking careworn.
    • 1843 December 18, Charles Dickens, “Stave Four. The Last of the Spirits.”, in A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, London: Chapman & Hall, […], OCLC 55746801 ↗, page 139 ↗:
      At length the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was care-worn and depressed, though he was young. There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.
    • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter I, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546 ↗; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., […], [1933], OCLC 2666860 ↗, page 10 ↗:
      Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.
    • 1991, Stephen Fry, The Liar, p. 49:
      I don't find the pose of careless youth charming and engaging any more than you find the pose of careworn age fascinating and eccentric, I should imagine.



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