self-torture
Americannoun
verb (used without object)
Other Word Forms
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Playing the game back in the mind — particularly for the defense — amounts to self-torture.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 10, 2021
Is doing a one-woman show actually a form of self-torture?
From Los Angeles Times ● May 4, 2018
Her nature is incredibly practical; there’s nothing practical about self-doubt and self-loathing and self-torture.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 15, 2016
He did not appear to be one of those actors given to second-guessing or self-torture after a night onstage.
From New York Times ● Jan. 5, 2016
How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
Twelve years ago, Theo felt more like an abstract idea; a man I romanticized in all of his sensitive, self-tortured, manic-pixie-dream-guy ways.
From Slate ● Apr. 11, 2025
Aloy, instead of the self-tortured clone of Elizabet Sobeck, becomes a traveling vagabond — learning the songs of the pastoral Utaru people or the creation myths of the warlike Tenakth.
From The Verge ● Feb. 14, 2022
The characters in this franchise are perhaps the most self-tortured, or perhaps just more convincing at it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 6, 2021
He wrote to a friend: “It’s far & away the best thing I’ve done, simpler, more honest, and, for the first time, out of myself — that is, not self-tortured or -absorbed or -eviscerated.”
From New York Times ● Mar. 13, 2018
Magdalen looked for a moment at the savage, self-tortured face, and her heart bled.
From Prisoners Fast Bound In Misery And Iron by Mary Cholmondeley
"He's incredibly insecure and very self-torturing," says Merrill Markoe, his former girlfriend, who helped create Late Night, devised such popular bits as Stupid Pet Tricks and wrote for the show until 1986.
From Time Magazine Archive
For the man on whom the archbishop smiled was Don Miguel Archibeque, longtime head of the self-torturing sect called Penitentes, which was officially banned by the church for almost 100 years.
From Time Magazine Archive
It was the voice of the self-torturing '20s, filled with a sort of sobjectivity that one critic described as "the authentic note of heartbreak," and it went over big.
From Time Magazine Archive
His own ideal, which he never attempted to practise, is that of the self-torturing ascetics of the Christian Middle Age.
From Schopenhauer by Thomas Whittaker
But sadness and a large amount of self-torturing pain were mingled with the satisfaction that her son had now come to her.
From The Son of His Mother by Clara Viebig
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
