“Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, Hateful and long-lasting, which had come on the people,ĭire wrack and ruin-the greatest of night-evils.” “They appear wracked with guilt, as if forgoing CPR was somehow akin to ‘giving up.’” “Terese is racked with guilt after paying Cecilia to incriminate Paul.” “I had to wrack my brain to remember whether my household owns a radio besides the one in our car.” “As a parent of a trans kid, I rack my brain for ways to help people understand what trans is and trans isn’t.”

“It’s an exciting and nerve-wracking time to be working in the nonprofit world, which is rapidly being reshaped by technology, generational shifts and emerging cultural priorities.” “The film doesn’t lack nerve-racking sequences or well-tuned jump scares.” But the fact is that although rack and wrack started out as distinct words, the usage has been so muddled for so many centuries that Merriam-Webster advises treating them as variants. The expression rack and ruin can also be written as wrack and ruin-in fact, the latter way of spelling it seems to be older, and it generally makes more sense. We can use wrack instead of rack only in phrases where they share the similar meaning of pain and destruction-such as nerve-(w)racking, (w)rack my brain, (w)racked with guilt. When we say it’s nerve-wracking, we’re saying that something is causing damage to our nerves. When we say that something is nerve-racking, we are literally saying that something is causing pain to our nerves. As a verb, wrack has the same meaning as the verb wreck, which is to damage, ruin, or destroy something. As a noun, it can be a wreckage, a wrecked ship, the leftovers of something destroyed, destruction itself, and kelp and dry seaweed. As a verb, rack can mean to display on a rack, to torture someone on a rack (or to cause pain in general), or to gather or accumulate something. As a noun, rack can be a framework for storing or displaying things, a cut of meat, a bar or rail used for adjusting things, a torture device, and that triangle thing you use to set the balls when playing pool.

Definition of wrack my brain