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pangs

Noun
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

Sudden sharp bursts of physical pain or intense emotional agony; used in poetry to evoke grief, heartbreak, or physical suffering.

Detailed Definition
In older or more literary English, pangs often means intense emotional suffering rather than physical pain alone. Tagore uses it to describe the speaker’s recurring sorrow and longing, giving the feeling a sustained, almost bodily force.
Example
Example in poetry:
“Let me carry the pangs of this sorrow in my dreams” uses pangs for sharp, sudden pains of body or feeling; Keats writes of “the pangs of despised love,” linking emotional suffering to physical sensation; “Each pang arrived like frost beneath the door” makes inward distress concrete through simile; Poetic pangs are often plural because grief, guilt, hunger, and longing recur in piercing waves
Additional Notes
In the line quoted, pangs is a literary word for intense suffering that many readers may not use in everyday speech.; Found in the poem, Let Me Not Forget by Rabindranath Tagore
Also Known As
sorrows pangs of grief emotional turmoil
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