Q: I almost never hear anybody say “heartrending” anymore. It appears to have been overthrown by “heart-wrenching,” which, I assume, is a conflation or hybridization with “gut-wrenching.” As is often the case, it seems that the incorrect usage is heard much more frequently than the correct one.
A: You’re right that the use of “heart-wrenching” has increased sharply in recent years, but the usage isn’t new. It’s been around for almost two centuries.
Here are the earliest examples we’ve found:
“The sluices of his tears were opened, and he burst out into sorrow, loud, vehement, and heart-wrenching.” From “The Brothers,” a story in Tales of Ireland (1834), by the Irish writer William Carleton.
“Loosen’d from guilt by a heart-wrenching shock, I hastened home.” From “Arthur: A Dramatic Fable, in Three Acts,” by Thomas Aird, published in July 1835 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.
(The Oxford English Dictionary cites a later printing of Aird’s fable in The Knickerbocker; or, New-York Monthly Magazine, July 1838.)
The term “heart-wrenching” is now recognized as standard by most of the online dictionaries we regularly consult. Merriam-Webster, for example, defines it as “very sad,” and has this example: “a heart-wrenching story.”
Cambridge and Collins include both the adjective “heart-wrenching” and adverb “heart-wrenchingly.” In defining the adjective, Dictionary.com defines “heart-wrenching” with a similar adjective, “heartbreaking.”
As for “heartrending” (sometimes hyphenated), it’s much older than “heart-wrenching,” but not necessarily more correct. And “heartbreaking” is even older and much more popular than either, according to a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer, which tracks terms in digitized books.
The earliest OED citation for “heartbreaking” is from “The Teares of the Muses,” a work in Complaints (1591), a poetry collection by Edmund Spenser: “Making your musick of hart-breaking mone [moan].”
The dictionary’s first “heartrending” example, which we’ve expanded, is from Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania (1621), a prose romance by the English writer Lady Mary Wroth:
“At last he cry’d out these words: Pardon great Prince this sad interruption in my story, which I am forst to do, heart-rending sorrow making me euer doe so.”
Finally, “heart-wrenching” is not, as you put it, “a conflation or hybridization with ‘gut-wrenching.’ ” The term “gut-wrenching” didn’t appear until the late 20th century, long after “heart-wrenching” was recorded.
The OED’s first citation for “gut-wrenching” is from a book about Grant McConachie, a bush pilot and later CEO of Canadian Pacific Airlines:
“Others had made a perfect landing thirty feet in the air, which was followed by a terrific, gut-wrenching splash as they plopped in” (from Bush Pilot With a Briefcase, 1972, by Ronald A. Keith).
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