sore

adj

1. Causing pain or discomfort; painfully sensitive.

   “Her feet were sore from walking so far.”

2. Sensitive; tender; easily pained, grieved, or vexed; very susceptible of irritation.

   “Malice and hatred are very fretting and vexatious, and apt to make our minds sore and uneasy.”

3. Dire; distressing.

   “The school was in sore need of textbooks, theirs having been ruined in the flood.”

4. (informal)Feeling animosity towards someone; annoyed or angered.

   “Joe was sore at Bob for beating him at checkers.”

   ““God damn it.” He was sore as hell. He was really furious.”

   “TfN is clearly very sore about last year's axing of part of HS2.”

5. (obsolete)Criminal; wrong; evil.

   “[…]and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.”

adv

1. (archaic, not-comparable)Very, excessively, extremely (of something bad).

   “And they answered Ioshua, and said, Because it was certainely told thy seruants, how that the Lord thy God commanded his seruant Moses to giue you all the land, and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land from before you, therefore we were sore afraid of our liues because of you, and haue done this thing.”

   “But on that day when Lancelot fled the lists, / His party, knights of utmost North and West, / Lords of waste marches, kings of desolate isles, / Came round their great Pendragon, saying to him / 'Lo, Sire, our knight thro' whom we won the day / Hath gone sore wounded, and hath left his prize / Untaken, crying that his prize is death.'”

   “Orion hit a rabbit once; but though sore wounded it got to the bury, and, struggling in, the arrow caught the side of the hole and was drawn out.”

2. (not-comparable)Sorely.

   “And indeed I blamed myself and sore repented me of having taken compassion on him and continued in this condition, suffering fatigue not to be described, […]”

   “[… they] were often sore pressed to follow the trail at all, and at best were so delayed that in the afternoon of the second day, they still had not overhauled the fugitive.”

noun

1. An injured, infected, inflamed or diseased patch of skin.

   “They put ointment and a bandage on the sore.”

2. Grief; affliction; trouble; difficulty.

   “I see plainly where his sore lies.”

3. A young hawk or falcon in its first year.

   “Of the soare faulcon so I learn to fly”

4. A young buck in its fourth year.

   “Some say a Sore, but not a sore, till now made sore with shooting. The Dogges did yell, put ell to Sore, then Sorell iumps from thicket: Or Pricket-sore, or else Sorell, the people fall a hooting. If Sore be sore, then ell to Sore, makes fiftie sores O sorell: Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more L.”

5. (abbreviation, acronym, alt-of)Acronym of small off-road engine.

   “Rather than banning these engines overnight, the state is rolling out the change gradually. The new rules tighten emissions standards over time, leading up to a ban on the sale of new gas-powered SOREs by 2028.”

verb

1. (transitive)To mutilate the legs or feet of (a horse) in order to induce a particular gait.
2. (intransitive)To grow sores; to be beset with skin lesions.