Definitions

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

  • adjective Full of or characterized by frenetic activity or wild excitement.
  • adjective Psychiatry Relating to or affected by mania.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Relating to or affected with mania.

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

  • adjective (Med.) Of or pert. to, or characterized by, mania, or excitement; frenzied.

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

  • adjective psychiatry manic-depressive
  • adjective Of or pertaining to someone who exhibits mania or craziness; wicked.
  • adjective Colloquial, to exhibit great energy, as one who is in the manic phase of manic depression.

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

  • adjective affected with or marked by frenzy or mania uncontrolled by reason

Etymologies

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

[Greek manikos, mad, from maniā, madness; see mania.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

mania +‎ -ic; Ancient Greek μανικός (manicos).

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Examples

  • I will tell you, though, on what you called manic Monday.

    CNN Transcript Feb 4, 2008 2008

  • Today's market, maybe more than ever before, is full of short term manic depressives being fed news stories by, more manic depressives.

    unknown title 2011

  • "What's kind of a red flag is when it is atypical for the person to talk like this," doing it only when they are in manic cycle but not at other times, she says.

    Bipolar Disorder: 10 Subtle Signs The Huffington Post News Team 2010

  • * Barnicide: the crime a parent is tempted to commit after being over-exposed to a certain manic purple dinosaur

    Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » WINNER, WINNER! 2007

  • BARNICIDE: the crime a parent is tempted to commit after being over-exposed to a certain manic purple dinosaur.

    Writer Unboxed » Blog Archive » Writer Unboxed’s CONTEST, CONTEST! 2007

  • FISHER: I like the name manic depression, though, because it describes what it ` s like.

    CNN Transcript Nov 10, 2009 2009

  • I'll probably remain manic until it starts to get reader reviews and such.

    Angel, New novels, old novels, and out-takes? deep_bluze 2004

  • And the word manic depression was never attached to what was wrong with him because he had a psychiatrist who didn't believe in it, thought if you put a name on things that it made it worse, and I didn't know it.

    CNN Transcript Jul 22, 2001 2001

  • But to me he's more interesting as the translator of two peculiarly great and problematic novelists: the Frenchman Georges Perec, whose work is characterized by a manic concern for form, and the Albanian Ismail Kadare, whose work Bellos translates not from the original Albanian, but from French translations supervised by Kadare.

    NYT > Home Page By ADAM THIRLWELL 2011

  • To this condition, Kraeplin give the name manic depression -- a term that although still in use, has been supplanted by the category of "bipolar disorder" in official psychiatric nomenclature.

    CNN.com 2010

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