the.com/sufferer
Pain's unpaid intern, doing all the work with none of the credit.
means A person who bears pain, illness, hardship, or loss — someone undergoing suffering rather than causing or merely witnessing it.
from From suffer, borrowed via Old French 'suffrir' from Latin 'sufferre' — 'sub' (under) plus 'ferre' (to bear or carry). The same 'ferre' that gives us 'transfer' and 'fertile.' So a sufferer is, at root, simply someone 'carrying under' a weight — the agent noun '-er' was tacked on to name the one doing that grim carrying.
- origin
- from latin sub plus ferre, to carry under
- misused as
- a badge instead of a burden
- legal use
- insurers love this word, victims don't
- grammar twist
- suffer is a verb, sufferer makes it an identity