Learn English – can we say ‘a pain’ ? or ‘a piece of pain’

countable-nounsmeaningnounsuncountable-nouns

Here what I'm talking about is 'pain' as a noun, describing something that makes you uncomfortable either physically or mentally.

As far as I know, it is countable when describing physical hurts. Then what about the 'mental' case ? If it's uncountable in that case, can we say 'a piece of pain' in the context that the pain(mentally) may result from different matters or experiences in our life and we want to distinguish them.

Furthermore, if 'a piece of pain' is correct, what is the comparative form of this phrase? 'one piece less of pain'? 'one less piece of pain'?

Best Answer

Even though a person with multiple injuries (an abscess in a tooth, a paper cut on the finger, and a broken leg) may feel a different type of pain resulting from each one, pain is usually not divided, so is not considered to be in divisible into "pieces". A person may be in more pain, or less pain, and the one inflicted with the pain is sometimes asked to rate the pain on a scale to indicate severity, but "a piece of pain" is not a common construct in the US.