nerve-rack

plural nerve-racks

1. alternativeAlternative form of nerve rack.

   John Stoem, during this time of nerve-rack and distress for Murchison, was thinking of quite other things.

   1916, George Allan England, The Golden Blight, page 44

   2 more examples

   For a week or two he answered airily enough, but as the time rolled on, the stereotyped replies grew forced, and the cold questions more pointed and insulting; clearly Mr. Melgarf was losing his respect once more, and showing it, until those exactly-timed visits became more the nerve-racks which they had been before.

   1890, Hume Nisbet, Ashes: A Tale of Two Spheres, page 235

   I shouted and laughed in a wild frenzy of overspilling nerve-rack while the blood in my veins swelled and leaped to the rhythm of the wheels—I was again stealing my way along one of vagrancy's beaten paths, and the going was none too certain!

   1907, William Bittle Wells, Lute Pease, The Pacific Monthly: A Magazine of Education and Progress