Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An abnormal condition of a part, organ, or system of an organism resulting from various causes, such as infection, inflammation, environmental factors, or genetic defect, and characterized by an identifiable group of signs, symptoms, or both.
  • noun A condition or tendency, as of society, regarded as abnormal and harmful.
  • noun Obsolete Lack of ease; trouble.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To make uneasy; pain; distress.
  • To affect with disease; make ill; disorder the body or mind of: used chiefly or only in the passive voice or the past participle.
  • noun Lack or absence of ease; uneasiness; pain; distress; trouble; discomfort.
  • noun In pathology: In general, a morbid, painful or otherwise distressing physical condition, acute or chronic, which may result either in death or in a more or loss complete return to health; deviation from the healthy or normal condition of any of the functions or tissues of the body.
  • noun Specifically— An individual case of such a morbid condition; the complex series of pathological conditions causally related to one another exhibited by one person during one period of illness; an attack of sickness.
  • noun A special class of morbid conditions grouped together as exhibiting the same or similar phenomena (symptoms, course, result), as affecting the same organs, or as due to the same causes: as, the diseases of the lungs, as pneumonia, consumption; the diseases of the brain.
  • noun Any disorder or depraved condition or element, moral, mental, social, or political.
  • noun Certain inflammatory conditions of joints attendant on locomotor ataxia.
  • noun See the adjectives.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • transitive verb obsolete To deprive of ease; to disquiet; to trouble; to distress.
  • transitive verb To derange the vital functions of; to afflict with disease or sickness; to disorder; -- used almost exclusively in the participle diseased.
  • noun obsolete Lack of ease; uneasiness; trouble; vexation; disquiet.
  • noun An alteration in the state of the body or of some of its organs, interrupting or disturbing the performance of the vital functions, and causing or threatening pain and weakness; malady; affection; illness; sickness; disorder; -- applied figuratively to the mind, to the moral character and habits, to institutions, the state, etc.
  • noun See under Germ.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun pathology An abnormal condition of the body or mind that causes discomfort or dysfunction; distinct from injury insofar as the latter is usually instantaneously acquired.
  • noun by extension Any abnormal or harmful condition, as of society, people's attitudes, way of living etc.
  • verb obsolete To cause unease; to annoy, irritate.
  • verb To infect with a disease.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an impairment of health or a condition of abnormal functioning

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English disese, from Old French : des-, dis- + aise, ease; see ease.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English disese, from Anglo-Norman desese, disaise, from Old French desaise (dis- +‎ ease). Displaced native Middle English adle, audle ("disease") (from Old English ādl ("disease, sickness")), Middle English cothe, coathe ("disease") (from Old English coþu ("disease")).

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Examples

  • Preventative care is a key component to avoiding heart disease, so below is a short but not comprehensive list of ways to lower your risk of heart disease*:

    Gender Disparities in the Battle Against Heart-Related Deaths « Gender Across Borders 2009

  • Read more about the Mediterranean diet for lowering heart disease riskprotecting your mental healthlower cholesterol for people with heart disease 

    Q&A: Is pomace olive oil bad for you? 2009

  • Adaptive Bleaching Hypothesis* satellite observations, and coral reef protection coral disease coral resistance to disease* ship groundings and anchor damage terrestrial runoff onto reefs threats to coral reefs other causes of coral decline

    Coral reefs (collection) 2008

  • _ Certain poisonous drugs may prove effective to suppress certain symptoms by benumbing the nerves and preventing pain; they may, and do counteract the natural process by which nature exercises her power in various ways in the spontaneous effort to throw off disease, in the form of inflammations, fevers or pains; _but they can never heal, or eradicate disease_.

    Valere Aude Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration Louis Dechmann

  • Therefore, in the following pages I am giving an extensive description of fever from a biological standpoint, together with its dietetic treatment -- not _cure_ for, as will be seen, _fever in itself is not a disease, but the attempt of nature to get rid of a disease_.

    Valere Aude Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration Louis Dechmann

  • Diagnosis, or recognition of the disease, must have been necessarily imperfect, when no scientific nosology, or system of disease* existed, and the knowledge of anatomy was quite inadequate to allow of a precise determination of the seat of disease; but symptoms were no doubt observed and interpreted skilfully.

    Nature Cure Henry Lindlahr 1893

  • In _psoas abscess_ associated with spinal disease, or in _disease of the bursa underneath the psoas_, the limb is flexed and everted, there may be lordosis, and the patient may limp in walking, but the movements at the hip are restricted only in the directions of extension and inversion, while in hip disease they are restricted in all directions.

    Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. Alexander Miles 1893

  • Neither age nor sex seems to be exempt fi? om this disease; children are frequently born vnth it. la - adults it sometimes arises io consequence of eJiEtemal violence, or inftam'matioii of the eye, andia these cases it may be regarded a€ altogether a local disease*.

    Practical Observations on Ectropium, Or Eversion of the Eye-lids: With the Description of a New ... Sir William Adams 1812

  • The word disease itself is revealing: disease, a lack of ease, an anxiety of the spirit and mind.

    God is Not a Christian, Nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu … Carlton Pearson 2010

  • The word disease itself is revealing: disease, a lack of ease, an anxiety of the spirit and mind.

    God is Not a Christian, Nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu … Carlton Pearson 2010

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