- Today's Word
Harried
HAIR-eed
Definition
(adjective) Feeling overwhelmed and stressed as a result of relentless demands and persistent pressure from multiple directions.
Example
She moved through the morning harried and slightly breathless — three meetings already behind her and two more she hadn’t prepared for waiting on the other side of lunch.
Word Origin
Harried derives from the verb harry, from the Old English hergian, meaning “to make war” or “to ravage” — the same root that gives us harrow and is related to the Old High German heri, meaning “army.” In its earliest English use, to harry meant to raid, pillage, and lay waste to enemy territory — what an army did when it swept through a landscape leaving nothing intact. The shift from military devastation to personal overwhelm happened gradually, the word softening from describing what armies did to kingdoms into what Mondays do to people.
Fun Fact
The Harrying of the North — William the Conqueror’s brutal campaign of 1069 to 1070 against the rebellious population of northern England — is one of history’s most literal applications of the word’s original meaning. William’s forces systematically destroyed crops, livestock, tools, and settlements across Yorkshire and neighboring counties, creating a famine so severe that chroniclers reported cannibalism in the aftermath. The Domesday Book, compiled seventeen years later, still recorded vast areas of northern England as waste — uninhabited and unproductive. The word harried has traveled a considerable distance from this origin, but the sense of relentless, exhausting assault from which there is no refuge survives intact.
