afflictive

comparative more afflictive · superlative most afflictive

1. That causes physical or mental pain.

   1847, Anne Brontë (as Acton Bell), Agnes Grey, London: Thomas Cautley Newby, Volume 3, Chapter 3, p. 54, In my childhood I could not imagine a more afflictive punishment than for my mother to refuse to kiss me at night: the very idea was terrible;

   4 more examples

   But the euil of the paine or the punishment of sin, or any kynde of afflictiue aduersitie, is not (in it self) absolutely euil, or simply to be fled from or auoyded.

   1576, George Gascoigne, The Droomme of Doomes Day, London: Gabriel Cawood, Part 2, Art. 15

   All this from Jove’s afflictive Hand we bear: Who, far from Argos, wills our Ruin here.

   1718, Alexander Pope, transl., The Iliad of Homer, London: Bernard Lintot, Volume 4, Book 14, p. 96

   The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

   1935, Marianne Moore, “Snakes, Mongooses, Snake Charmers, and the Like”, in Collected Poems, New York: Macmillan, published 1951, page 65

   […] in the days and weeks that passed, in absentia—or perhaps from a distance—he’d gradually filled my life, our lives, with his afflictive presence.

   2015, Chigozie Obioma, chapter 8, in The Fishermen, Boston: Little, Brown