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Bear the brunt

Idiomatic Phrase
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

To suffer or endure the worst part of an unpleasant experience, hardship, or attack.

Detailed Definition
Deriving from military usage where the brunt was the first, fiercest shock of battle, this idiom describes absorbing the greatest share of harm. In poetry, it appears in works of social justice, elegy, and witness, naming those—the poor, the vulnerable, the marginalized—who shoulder disproportionate suffering. Poets invoke it to honor endurance, critique inequality, or acknowledge the unequal distribution of grief and labor. Its physical connotations—bearing, brunt—make it tactile and immediate, suited to poems that insist on the bodily reality of suffering. The phrase also carries a note of dignity: to bear the brunt implies not merely suffering but a kind of moral weight borne with or without choice.
Example
Example in poetry:
A social justice poem might observe that the poor always bear the brunt of economic policy — their neighborhoods cut first, their children's schools defunded while the cost of failure is redistributed upward; In war poetry, to bear the brunt is to honor the foot soldiers — those in the first wave, those who absorbed the shock of the enemy's fiercest assault — with the dignity their sacrifice deserves; Wilfred Owen's poetry is saturated with those who bear the brunt: young men at the front absorbing what the generals and politicians designed from a distance; A poem about family dynamics might describe the eldest child as the one who bore the brunt of the parents' worst years — the one who absorbed the damage before the household stabilized; The idiom suits elegies that insist on naming what was actually endured, refusing the euphemism that softens what was harsh and borne without choice; In a poem about chronic illness, the body bears the brunt — the poem a reckoning with what the flesh has absorbed and continues to absorb in the daily transaction with a world not built for it
Additional Notes
This phrase indicates who suffers the heaviest impact. In poetry, it can expose unequal burdens: the poor bear the brunt of policy, mothers of war, children of adult failure, or the body of emotional strain. It pairs well with impact imagery such as blows, waves, shields, walls, and weather. The idiom is morally useful because it asks who pays the real cost.
Also Known As
Take the worst of it Suffer most
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