The word "agonies" is a correct and usable word in written English.
It is used to describe intense physical or mental suffering. For example, "The patient experienced agonizing pain before finally succumbing to the illness."
It wasn't so long ago, of course, that Simon Cowell's serious political endorsement was ferociously sought by both major parties, with Gordon Brown said to have been in agonies to discover that the Sun's splash on the morning of the 2010 general election featured Cowell coming out for the Tories.
Yes, it might be irritating for those who don't really come across it in their lives to be constantly reminded of the agonies of the most miserable species on the planet.
Thousands of young Nepali men, mainly from remote villages, slaving now in horrendous conditions in the Gulf states to support their rural families, must be suffering agonies of not knowing the fate of their families who depend on them (In the villages they wait for aid that may never come, 28 April).
Al Pacino is a middle-aged guy happily married with grown-up children to an intelligent non-babe his own age, and Russell Crowe plays an intellectual and a scientist whose agonies are not of the heart.
What to most people would be cause for a minor outbreak of sheepishness can lead Knausgaard to suffer agonies of mortification.
I will consider offers to display it in international galleries to speak about the suffering of Gaza and the agonies of war".
Keith was a brilliant but indecisive character; he went through agonies, and then made a somewhat ill-judged speech [on sexual promiscuity and social deprivation] which, in the stupid daily atmosphere of politics, was instantly assumed to have cost him his chance.
(Damascus, not surprisingly, accused the GCC of peddling "lies and delusions," encouraging the shedding of Syrian blood, and "weeping crocodile tears over the agonies of the Syrian people").
It claims that the new programming lingo, called Extensible Markup Language (XML for short) will abolish most of the agonies and restrictions imposed by HTML, and thereby make the problems of broken links and junk easier to solve.HTML has contributed enormously to making the Web accessible to ordinary people: it is simple and compact.
Only after these agonies did the Parliament Act of 1911, which subjugated the Lords to the Commons and began the erosion of the hereditary principle, become law.A century later, the heirs to the old Liberal Party face scarcely less daunting hurdles as they try to finish the job of Lords reform.
The agonies of Kenneth Branagh's failed imitation in Celebrity?
