Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Any of several forms of infectious disease caused by rickettsia, especially those transmitted by fleas, lice, or mites, and characterized generally by severe headache, sustained high fever, depression, delirium, and the eruption of red rashes on the skin. Also called prison fever, ship fever, typhus fever.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A fever accompanied by great prostration, usually delirium, and an eruption of small reddishpurple spots; ship-fever; jail-fever. Compare typhus fever under fever.
Wiktionary
- n. pathology One of several similar diseases, characterised by high recurrent fever, caused by Rickettsiae bacteria. Not to be confused with typhoid fever.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Med.) A contagious continued fever lasting from two to three weeks, attended with great prostration and cerebral disorder, and marked by a copious eruption of red spots upon the body. Also called
jail fever ,famine fever ,putrid fever ,spottled fever , etc. See Jail fever, under jail.
WordNet 3.0
- n. rickettsial disease transmitted by body lice and characterized by skin rash and high fever
Etymologies
- From New Latin typhus, from Ancient Greek τῦφος (typhos, "fever, stupor"), of uncertain origin (Wiktionary)
- New Latin tȳphus, from Greek tūphos, stupor arising from a fever, vapor, from tūphein, to smoke. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Humans can contract the endemic form of typhus from the bites of rat fleas.”
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico
“In contrast to the smallpox virus, which cannot survive outside living human bodies, typhus is transmitted to people by insects.”
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico
“That this was an outbreak of typhus is further suggested by later comparisons of it to another severe epidemic, that of the great matlazáhuatl epidemic of 1736.47 But an accurate diagnosis of the illnesses behind these epidemics may never be known.”
Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico
“As one author so truly says, the history of typhus is the history of human misfortune.”
“Nicolle was not long in making another important discovery: he established that the germ of typhus is not transmitted to new generations of parasites.”
“One of the peculiarities of typhus is the way in which it tends to cause serious epidemics, flaring up suddenly and coinciding with the previous occurrence of some serious public calamity.”
“Director of the Bureau of Public Health in Tunis; in three years he eradicated typhus from a town where it had raged year after year since the beginning of history.”
“In man typhus is characterized by a triade of symptoms: fever, rash, nervous symptoms.”
“This description of fever is usually termed typhus or nerve fever.”
Valere Aude Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration
“So far we've been able to contain typhus, the great international disease, and cholera, and the plague has, not broken out in any wide way, thanks to medical science, thanks to this marvelous new powder, DDT, not the DT's but DDT's.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘typhus’.
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TAAKC
Chabon words
contrivance, fokker, selvage, indolence, prestidigitated, omniveillant, penury, misapprehension, lachrymose, redoubt, acromegaly, divan and 84 more...
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Buggin' out
bacteria, antibiotic, spirochete, anthrax, gram positive, gram negative, tuberculosis, bacillus, typhus, rickettsia prowaz..., orientia tsutsuga..., vaccine and 24 more...
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Hannibal
punic, ba'al, toffit, molech, cognate, moabite, pathogen, apologist, legate, shoals, immolate, emnity and 41 more...
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