Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Causing disease; inducing disease.

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

  • adjective Causing disease; generating a sickly state.

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

  • adjective That causes disease; sickening, pathogenic.

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

  • adjective able to cause disease

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Latin morbus, "sickness", and -ific.

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Examples

  • No man could look down into a certain pair of sparkling eyes that are wonderfully familiar to me and talk about things as 'morbific' or 'renascent.'

    Mushrooms on the Moor Frank Boreham 1915

  • Therefore any single dimension of health cannot be considered in isolation, as the human organism works, as an integrated whole always, whether performing its normal functions or defending itself from morbific stimuli.

    The Integral Way of Healing Tusar N Mohapatra 2006

  • In tertian fever, the morbific cause seeking the heart in the first instance, and hanging about the heart and lungs, renders the patient short-winded, disposed to sighing, and indisposed to exertion, because the vital principle is oppressed and the blood forced into the lungs and rendered thick.

    On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals 2005

  • The febrile paroxysm is fully formed, whilst the preternatural heat kindled in the heart is thence diffused by the arteries through the whole body along with the morbific matter, which is in this way overcome and dissolved by nature.

    On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals 2005

  • This morbific material is best understood by regarding it as being in an incomplete or half-way stage, in which form it is injurious.

    The Art of Living in Australia 2004

  • And, you see, what makes this even more remarkable is that during the dark month of January, my first month with the aunt and uncle, I had fallen into a morbific depression and so had prescribed to myself the cure of reading lots of Wodehouse.

    Wake Up, Sir! Jonathan Ames 2004

  • Thomas Sydenham, the seventeenth-century physician known as the ‘English Hippocrates’, wrote, ‘Disease is nothing else but an attempt of the body to rid itself of morbific matter’.

    The Tao of Health, Sex and Longevity Daniel Reid 1989

  • The disease itself was Nature's struggle to re - store health by elimination of the morbific matter.

    HEALTH AND DISEASE OWSEI TEMKIN 1968

  • When the humors of the body could not be concocted, or when they contracted “a morbific blemish from this or that at - mospheric constitution” (ibid.), or when they turned poisonous because of a contagion, then they were

    HEALTH AND DISEASE OWSEI TEMKIN 1968

  • "You have won," she thought, regarding the murky thickets that were hung with morbific blossoms, the trees that remained a labyrinth even while they dissolved in the night.

    Sacrifice Stephen French Whitman

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