Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- adj. Of or relating to the mind; intellectual: mental powers.
- adj. Executed or performed by the mind; existing in the mind: mental images of happy times.
- adj. Of, relating to, or affected by a disorder of the mind.
- adj. Intended for treatment of people affected with disorders of the mind.
- adj. Of or relating to telepathy or mind reading.
- adj. Slang Emotionally upset; crazed: got mental when he saw the dent in his new car.
- adj. Offensive Slang Slang Mentally or psychologically disturbed.
- adj. Of or relating to the chin.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Of or pertaining to the mind; specifically, belonging to or characteristic of the intellect; intellectual: as, the mental powers or faculties; a mental state or condition; mental perception.
- Done or performed by the mind; due to the action of the mind.
- Relating to the mind; concerned with the nature, attributes, or phenomena of the human intellect: as, mental philosophy; mental sciences.
- In anat, of or pertaining to the mentum or chin; genial.
- n. An Oriental water-tight basket, having four ropes attached, by which two men raise water from a stream or cistern and discharge it into a trench for irrigation.
Wiktionary
- adj. Of or relating to the mind or an intellectual process.
- adj. colloquial, comparable Insane, mad, crazy.
- adj. colloquial, UK, comparable Enjoyable; fun.
- adj. anatomy Of or relating to the chin or median part of the lower jaw, genial.
- adj. biology Of or relating to the chin-like or lip-like structure.
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. (Anat.) Of or pertaining to the chin; genian.
- n. (Zoöl.) A plate or scale covering the mentum or chin of a fish or reptile.
- adj. Of or pertaining to the mind; intellectual.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. of or relating to the mind
- adj. of or relating to the chin- or liplike structure in insects and certain mollusks
- adj. affected by a disorder of the mind
- adj. of or relating to the chin or median part of the lower jaw
- adj. involving the mind or an intellectual process
Etymologies
- From Middle French mental, from Late Latin mentālis ("of the mind, mental"), from Latin mēns ("the mind"). Also from Latin mentum ("the chin"), depending on usage. (Wiktionary)
- Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin mentālis, from Latin mēns, ment-, mind; see men-1 in Indo-European roots.From Latin mentum, chin; see men-2 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Psychology, even so empirical a psychology as is possible of demonstration in western schools and colleges, evidences the fact that there is a far greater field of mental operation than is covered by the outer, or _mental_ consciousness.”
“Western Science, while performing a marvelous work in piling up fact after fact to support its newly-discovered theory of Evolution, in a way utterly unknown to the Oriental thinker who seeks after principles by mental concentration -- _within_ rather than without -- while actually proving by physical facts the _mental_ conceptions of the”
“They need a positive mental (Int or Wis in this case) which follows the +physical/+mental/- anything format.”
“Hearing the term mental block, she had always envisioned her barriers as just that, blocks—brightly colored and piled up in a wall between her and whatever she wanted to shut out.”
“Like many agency heads, SAMHSA Administrator Pamela Hyde has abandoned use of the term mental "illness" and avoids the term "mental health" feeling these are too limiting to their agencies newly formed expansive mission.”
The Huffington Post: DJ Jaffe: Improve Care For Mentally Ill: Eliminate Mental Health Agencies
“Dr. ALLEN FRANCES (Psychiatrist): Over the course of time, we've become looser and looser in applying the term mental disorder to the expectable aches and pains and sufferings of everyday life.”
“Clay Shirky used (coined?) the term mental transaction costs to describe the problem with using micropayments (small payments to download articles or music).”
“Excerpt: The term mental retardation was supposed to be an improvement.”
“Primitive personality disorder PPD is the term mental health professionals use to describe this set of characteristics.”
“And then there's "Primitive personality disorder PPD is the term mental health professionals use to describe this set of characteristics.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘mental’.
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EN - academic vocabulary
Use these and get promoted
abandon, abandonment, abnormally, abstract, abstraction, abstractly, abstracts, academia, academic, academically, academics, academies and 3119 more...
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Words related to knowledge
Words that relate to learning, knowing, being enlightened...
revelation, eureka, awakening, idea, sapient, astute, canny, intelligent, wise, sharp, shrewd, informed and 467 more...
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phrontistery - m
from phrontistery.info
mabble, mabsoot, macadamize, macarism, macarize, macaronic, macerate, macerator, machair, machairodont, machicolation, machinule and 898 more...
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Bonkers
List for old and new terms and phrases meaning crazy, nuts, batty, prone to extreme nervousness, etc.
bonkers, crazy, nuts, batty, batchy, bats in the belfry, scatty, crackers, windy, gone crackers, cracked, dingo and 92 more...
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EU Buzz - Lisbon Treaty
All words of the Lisbon Treaty
(Persons' names, foreign and grammatical words have been eliminated, MWEs have been split up into individual words. Capitalization has been retained if r...conferral, stateless, person, voting, right, subsidiarity, Latvia, Malta, Slovenia, Lithuania, Finland, Estonia and 2614 more...
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Words sung by: Belle and Sebastian
beguiling, herbaceous, peninsula, suffragette, damascan, hastening, berserk, overtime, leccy, bestow, swathe, arab strap and 193 more...
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disinformation
words meaning bad or not real data
foo, gobbledygook, spin, blacklist, corrupt, fraudulent, debauched, nefarious, untrustworthy, spam, deranged, mental and 22 more...
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Pterodactyl's Game of Postal Abbrevia...
Here's a fun little word game that might appeal to my fellow Wordies. The object of this game is to create the longest possible word, using only the official two-letter abbreviations of U.S. states...
deny, lame, mope, demand, camp, cask, hind, decamp, canvas, scalar, mental, pronks and 75 more...
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Bonkers
crackers, barmy, half-baked, mental, unhinged, barking, cuckoo, cracked, nuts, mad, insane, touched and 24 more...
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Twitter favourites
The new favourite words of people on Twitter.
A script searches Twitter for "X is my new favourite word" and adds it to this list.
See also:
thunderfuck, incredible, merp, sara, flopparoo, smother, fugly, buer, plum, canny, nefelibata, cuntbucket and 2455 more... -
ESL Academic Word List
This is a list of academic words for students learning English as a Second or Foreign Language. It includes 570 word families that often appear in academic texts. It does not include words that are...
collapse, depression, colleagues, invoked, levy, nonetheless, likewise, so-called, ongoing, conceived, forthcoming, integrity and 558 more...
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Basic English Vocabulary
Very basic words for ESL students.
a, abandon, ability, able, abortion, about, above, abroad, absence, absolute, absolutely, absorb and 4334 more...
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1
horizon, echo, undulation, resonance, reflection, acoustic, swoosh, distant, glide, interspace, marbles, radiant and 144 more...
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Learned words
Words which are highly likely to be found in the work of learned writers.
ailurophile, labyrinthine, lagniappe, colleague, anechoic, reglets, fluctuations, scalar, implicit, constitute, mortification, ambassadors and 629 more...
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boychoir's Words
tantamount, nom de guerre, absurd, dolt, transmute, dichotomy, dandy, schadenfreude, ennui, binary, analog, obfuscate and 93 more...
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The things they carried (List 2)
Listening to this as an audio book for the second time. Tim O'Brien uses simple words and phrases to great effect. Very few unfamilar and big words . The writing style reminds me of words from Joh...
The, Things, They, Carried, meant, fond, By necessity,, presented to him, far beyond, against the brick..., reaching, taut and 2940 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for mental.
Telofy “The Office, in contrast, and I might have chosen other examples such as I’m Alan Partridge or The League of Gentlemen, is, if only obliquely monumental though avowedly anti-sentimental, certainly ‘mental’ in at least three senses of the word. Firstly, it is cerebral. Secondly, it is anarchic. Thirdly, it is angry.”
—Peter Stear, Mockumentalism: Re-Casting the Void in Contemporary British TV Comedy Jan 10, 2010
Prolagus They let Lisa go blind
The world was at her feet and she was looking down
They let Lisa go blind
But everyone she knew thought she was beautiful
Only slightly mental
Beautiful, only temperamental.
(Beautiful, by Belle and Sebastian) Aug 24, 2008