pain [ME] This goes back to Latin poena which originally meant ‘penalty’ and later came to mean ‘pain’, and is also the source of to pine [OE] ‘to long for’, but originally meaning ‘to suffer’; penal; and penalty [both LME]. Punish [ME] comes from the related verb punire. Pain in the neck dates from the 1920s; from this, a pain for an annoying person developed in the 1930s. Although the phrase no pain, no gain is associated with exercise classes from the 1980s, the two words have been associated since the 16th century and ‘No Pains, No Gains’ is the title of a 1648 poem by Robert Herrick.