Verb

(en verb)

To disturb or irritate, especially by continued or repeated acts; to bother with unpleasant deeds.

* Prior

Say, what can more our tortured souls annoy / Than to behold, admire, and lose our joy?

* {{quote-magazine, title=No hiding place

, date=2013-05-25, volume=407, issue=8837, page=74, magazine=(The Economist) citation , passage=In America alone, people spent $170 billion on “direct marketing”—junk mail of both the physical and electronic varieties—last year. Yet of those who received unsolicited adverts through the post, only 3% bought anything as a result. If the bumf arrived electronically, the take-up rate was 0.1%. And for online adverts the “conversion” into sales was a minuscule 0.01%. That means about $165 billion was spent not on drumming up business, but on annoying people, creating landfill and cluttering spam filters.}}

To do something to upset or anger someone; to be troublesome.

To molest; to harm; to injure.

to annoy an army by impeding its march, or by a cannonade

* Evelyn

tapers put into lanterns or sconces of several-coloured, oiled paper, that the wind might not annoy them

Verb

(en-verb)

(obsolete) To kill.

(obsolete) To reduce the potency of; to nullify; to deaden, neutralize.

* Francis Bacon

Quicksilver is mortified with turpentine.

* Hakewill

He mortified pearls in vinegar.

(obsolete) To kill off (living tissue etc.); to make necrotic.

*, II.3:

*:Servius the Grammarian being troubled with the gowt, found no better meanes to be rid of it, than to apply poison to mortifie his legs.

To discipline (one's body, appetites etc.) by suppressing desires; to practise abstinence on.

Some people seek sainthood by mortifying the body.

* Harte

With fasting mortified , worn out with tears.

* Prior

Mortify thy learned lust.

* Bible, Col. iii. 5

Mortify , therefore, your members which are upon the earth.

(usually, used passively) To embarrass, to humiliate.

I was so mortified I could have died right there, instead I fainted, but I swore I'd never let that happen to me again.

*

, title=(The Celebrity), chapter=5 , passage=Then we relapsed into a discomfited silence, and wished we were anywhere else. But Miss Thorn relieved the situation by laughing aloud, and with such a hearty enjoyment that instead of getting angry and more mortified we began to laugh ourselves, and instantly felt better.}}

(obsolete) To affect with vexation, chagrin, or humiliation; to humble; to depress.

* Evelyn

the news of the fatal battle of Worcester, which exceedingly mortified our expectations

* Addison

How often is the ambitious man mortified with the very praises he receives, if they do not rise so high as he thinks they ought!

(Scotland, legal, historical) To grant in mortmain

* 1876 James Grant, History of the Burgh and Parish Schools of Scotland , Part II, Chapter 14, p.453 ( PDF 2.7 MB):

the schoolmasters of Ayr were paid out of the mills mortified by Queen Mary