experience

experience vb Experience, undergo, sustain, suffer are comparable when they mean to pass through the process of actually coming to know or to feel.

Experience means little more than this. It implies that something (as a sensation, an emotion, or an occasion) is known not from hearsay but from an actual living through it or going through it

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the disgust he had inspired in me before . . . was a weak and transient feeling to what I now experienced— Hudson

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we cannot experience the sweetness of a single molecule of sugar, nor the smell of a single molecule of musk— Jeans

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Undergo carries a strong implication of bearing or enduring or of being subjected to that is almost lacking in experience; it frequently takes as an object a distressing experience (as pain, suffering, or hardships) when the subject names a person

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undergo great disappointment

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undergo a serious operation

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his fine spirit was broken by the anxieties he had undergone— Martineau

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the search for truth . . . makes men and women content to undergo hardships— Eliot

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But when it is used with objects which represent a process which covers years or ages of time, it comes closer to experience in meaning, though it seldom takes an individual as its subject

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a man experiences a change of heart, but a race undergoes changes which are not apparent for many gen- erations

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Very occasionally, when the idea of submission to or imposition upon is stressed, the subject of undergo in the active voice may be impersonal

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the bridge must undergo inspection before it is accepted by the government

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Sustain suggests undergoing infliction or imposition without implying as a necessary concomitant courage in resisting or enduring

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sustain a great loss through fire

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sustain an injury

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the two dropped supine into chairs at opposite corners of the ring as if they had sustained excessive fatigue— Shaw

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must be prepared to sustain heavy losses— Bliven b. 1889

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Suffer, which is frequently used interchangeably with sustain in this sense, carries a more marked implication of the harm done or injury wrought and is preferable when what is affected is a thing; moreover, suffer may also be used intransitively

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all suffered the same fate

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the very language of France has suffered considerable alterations since you were conversant in French books— Burke

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a great author necessarily suffers by translation— Inge

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Sometimes suffer loses its distinctive quality and is then nearly equal to experience

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Gard suffered an odd impulse to get up and kick his chair over— Mary Austin

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most or all genes suffer mutational changes from time to time— Dobzhansky

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Analogous words: *see, perceive, behold, view, survey