Log in or Sign up
  1. malady love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. A disease, a disorder, or an ailment.
  2. n. An unwholesome condition: the malady of discontent.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A physical disorder or disease; sickness or distemper of any kind; especially, a chronic, deep-seated, or dangerous disease.
  2. n. Hence, moral or mental disorder; any disordered state or condition: as, social maladies.
  3. n. Synonyms Infirmity, Distemper, etc. (see disease); complaint, ailment.

Wiktionary

  1. n. Any ailment or disease of the human body; especially, a lingering or deep-seated disorder.
  2. n. A moral or mental defect or disorder.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. Any disease of the human body; a distemper, disorder, or indisposition, proceeding from impaired, defective, or morbid organic functions; especially, a lingering or deep-seated disorder.
  2. n. A moral or mental defect or disorder.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. any unwholesome or desperate condition
  2. n. impairment of normal physiological function affecting part or all of an organism

Etymologies

  1. Middle English maladie, from Old French maladie ("sickness, illness, disease"), from malade ("ill, sick"), from Latin male habitus ("ill-kept, not in good condition"), 1st century AD. See also malice and habit. (Wiktionary)
  2. Middle English maladie, from Old French, from malade, sick, from Latin male habitus, in poor condition : male, badly; see mel-3 in Indo-European roots + habitus, past participle of habēre, to hold; see ghabh- in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “And when her imagination became occasionally darkened by that gloom which she termed her malady, nothing could be more impressive than the tone of deep and touching piety which mingled with and elevated her melancholy into a cheerful solemnity of spirit, that swayed by its pensive dignity the habits and affections of her whole family.”

    Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two

  • “And the APA – the organization responsible for medically determining matters such as this. bitblt says: except the malady is self-declared and there is no known case,”

    Think Progress » Portugal’s parliament approves same-sex marriage.

  • “I just pray her malady is painful and that she suffers excruciating pain on her way out.”

    Barbara Bush released from hospital

  • “The root of contemporary (as distinguished from "modern") malady is the implication of the masses (in a sense, all of us -- no matter how personally blameless) in the "sexual revolution".”

    Ideology and the destruction of body and soul

  • “Descriptions of the malady from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries relate the horror of its effects: the terrible sores and swellings, often extending into the mouth and throat, and leaving the body covered with scabs that turned from red to black; severe fever; pain in the bones so intense that patients "screamed day and night without respite, envying the dead themselves"; and, often early death.”

    Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico

  • “We keep in touch, I always inquire about him, he is a devotee of Khwajah Gharib Nawaz the Holy Saint of Ajmer ..now if you call his malady a disease than the first person to infect him with the poison was his uncle who gagged him and sodomized him when his family was away..he has not forgotten that and weeps each time he talks of this persecution ..this assault on his body and soul.”

    Archive 2009-07-01

  • ““Verily, this my malady is mortal and the shaft of death hath executed that which Allah Almighty decreed against me: this is the last of my days in the world here and the first of my days in the world hereafter.””

    The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night

  • “I would have, quite literally, looked like I had just escaped from the special ed class, and the ice cream truck driver would have wondered what sort of brain malady I suffered from as I happily handed over my wadded-up dollar bills.”

    Apparently, I Have An Opinion On Sports - Who Knew?

  • “Until now, the latest information on chronic wasting disease suggested that the malady is passed only via direct contact between deer.”

    Wasting Disease News Flash: Deer can get disease from the dirt

  • “Once when they were all together, “Pray, Doctor, ” cried he, “how is it you call the malady our friend is labouring under?”

    Chapter X. Book VIII

Show 10 more examples...

Log in or sign up to add your own related words.

synonyms (6)

Words with the same meaning

  1. disorder
  1. illness
  1. distemper
  1. sickness
  1. disease
  1. ailment

hypernyms (2)

Words that are more generic or abstract

  1. condition
  1. status

same context (20)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. ailment
  2. illness
  3. affliction
  4. disease
  1. convulsion
  2. plague
  3. disturbance
  4. distemper
  1. headache
  2. insanity
  3. pestilence
  4. suffer
  1. infirmity
  2. paralysis
  3. weakness
  4. disability
  1. epidemic
  2. leprosy
  3. disaster
  4. gout

reverse dictionary (24)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. disease
  2. indisposition
  3. evil
  4. infirmity
  1. illness
  2. cure
  3. grief
  4. tick
  1. malaise
  2. shrew-struck
  3. dunt
  4. epiphenomenon
  1. sickness
  2. malady
  3. affection
  4. distemper
  1. complaint
  2. rickets
  3. disorder
  4. enterprise
  1. mother
  2. quarantine
  3. seizure
  4. sickly

tags (1)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. pathology

Log in or sign up to add your own tag.

Wordmap

(beta)

Word visualization

Lists

These user-created lists contain the word ‘malady’.

More lists containing ‘malady’

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • whichbe My Malady Nov 18, 2008

  • qroqqa A surprising etymology for the second half. Abstract noun (-y) derivative of French malade "ill; sick person", earlier malabde < *malabido < Classical male habitum "having it badly". Aug 20, 2008

  • sonofgroucho This sounds much more elegant than a disease! Oct 15, 2007

Tweets

Looking for tweets for malady.

‘malady’ has been looked up 3408 times, loved by 5 people, added to 58 lists, commented on 3 times, and has a Scrabble score of 12.