Mental distress or agitation from dwelling on a specific, usually practical problem.
Mental distress or agitation from dwelling on a specific, usually practical problem — repetitive, active fretting.
The everyday, down-to-earth member: it points to the act of stewing over things that may or may not warrant concern, and it nearly always fastens onto nameable, frequently practical troubles (“financial worries”). Mental, active, and looping — you stew, you “worry yourself sick.” Set apart from anxiety (more anguished and diffuse, sometimes objectless or clinical), unease (vaguer), nervousness (more bodily and pre-event), and misgiving (a pointed doubt). The slow, gnawing cousin — well below the acute spike of fright, alarm, panic, or terror.
From Old English wyrgan “to strangle”; via Middle English “to injure by biting/shaking the throat” (as a dog does). The figurative “annoy, vex” sense is from c. 1400; “cause mental distress” from 1822; the noun “harassing anxiety” from 1804.
A well-sourced shift from physical violence to mental state: from strangling/throat-shaking to “harass, torment” (c. 1400) to internal “mental distress” only in the 19th century — a comparatively recent psychologizing of an originally violent word. No reliable recent-generation shift is sourced.