overwrought

What it means

1. Excessively nervous, excited, tense, angry, anxious, or upset; overemotional; very uneasy.

   Synonyms: distraught, overwhelmed, distressed, agitated, strung, wrought-up, strung

2. Elaborate; baroque; overdone.

   Her book includes an incisive discussion of misogyny on the New Right. [Laura K.] Field notes how “gynocracy” and “the longhouse” have become overwrought MAGA epithets for an unbearably feminized and pluralist society.

   2025 December 17, Jennifer Szalai, “The Intellectuals Fueling the MAGA Movement”, in The New York Times Book Review, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 17 Dec 2025

   1 more example

   Gated, gilded and gaudy, they have sprung up all over China: overwrought government buildings erected at vast public expense, and in stark contrast to the shoddy state of so many homes and schools. In style they range from modernist brutalism to Versailles kitsch.

   2013 July 27, “Architectural bombast”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8846, archived from the original on 13 Dec 2013

   Synonyms: ornate, overdecorated

In a sentence

Gated, gilded and gaudy, they have sprung up all over China: overwrought government buildings erected at vast public expense, and in stark contrast to the shoddy state of so many homes and schools. In style they range from modernist brutalism to Versailles kitsch.

2013 July 27, “Architectural bombast”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8846, archived from the original on 13 Dec 2013

Where it comes from

Past participle of overwork; equivalent to over- + wrought.