Prolonged, wretched suffering or unhappiness.
Prolonged, wretched suffering or unhappiness — emotional or material — often without a single triggering event.
Denotes diffuse, all-encompassing wretchedness: it names the unhappiness that accompanies above all illness, want, or bereavement, and can be material or physical as much as emotional. More chronic and total than sadness, dejection, gloom, or despondency (moods/states of mind), and broader than the acute anguish or the hope-extinguished despair. Where woe is archaic/literary, misery is everyday and concrete (“living in misery,” “put out of one's misery”). Chiefly British, it can colloquially name a chronic complainer.
Late 14c. “condition of external unhappiness,” from Latin miseria “wretchedness,” from miser “wretched, pitiable.” The sense “great mental distress” is recorded from the 1530s.
Earliest English use emphasized external/material affliction; the internal sense of great mental sorrow is a later development (1530s). Both the material and emotional senses coexist today. No reliable recent-generation shift.