abnormal psychology
noun
Simple meaning
The academic study of persons whose psychological characteristics deviate from the norm, such as neuroses, psychoses, and other disorders.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
abnawrmuhlsykahluhjeeSay the bold part a little louder.
IPA pronunciation (US)
æbˈnɔɹməlsaɪkɑlədʒi
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
The academic study of persons whose psychological characteristics deviate from the norm, such as neuroses, psychoses, and other disorders.
An instance of a person having psychological characteristics that deviate from the norm.
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: The academic study of persons whose psychological characteristics deviate from the norm, such as neuroses, psychoses, and other disorders.
Used this way, abnormal psychology is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in academic writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Where it naturally appears
- Academic writing
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.